I S S U E # 1 1 : P H O T O G R A P H YA N D P H I L O S O P H Y11

nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanitiesaffi l iated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all r ights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668

E D I T O R I A L B O A R DBridget Alsdorf

Jennifer Ashton

Todd Cronan

Rachael DeLue

Michael Fried

Oren Izenberg

Brian Kane

Ruth Leys

Walter Benn Michaels

Charles Palermo

Robert Pippin

Adolph Reed, Jr.

Victoria H.F. Scott

Kenneth Warren

James Welling

Lisa Chinn, editorial assistant

F O R A U T H O R S

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nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated

with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668.

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I S S U E # 1 1 : P H O T O G R A P H Y A N DP H I L O S O P H YW I N T E R 2 0 1 3 / 2 0 1 4T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

I S S U E D E S C R I P T I O N

Issue #11: Photography and Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

F E A T U R E S

The Miracle of Analogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12By Kaja Silverman (University of Pennsylvania)

Response to Kaja Silverman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30By Todd Cronan (Emory University)

The Force of a Frame: Owen Kydd's Durational Photographs . . . . . . . 34By Walter Benn Michaels (UIC)

Re: Response to Walter Benn Michaels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44By Margaret Olin

Photography, Automatism, Mechanicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52By Charles Palermo (College of William & Mary)

Action and Automatism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58By Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick)

T H E T A N K

Jameson’s The Antinomies of RealismThe Antinomies of Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68By Goran Blix (Princeton University), Danielle Follett (Université de Franche

Comté), Fabio Akcelrud Durão (Universidade Estadual de Campinas), Marnin Young

(Yeshiva University), Danielle Coriale (University of South Carolina) and Kevin Chua

(Texas Tech University)

Jameson Responds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102By Fredric Jameson (Duke University)

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P O E T R Y

Two Sonnets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108By Anthony Opal

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I S S U E D E S C R I P T I O NI S S U E D E S C R I P T I O N

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I S S U E # 1 1 : P H O T O G R A P H Y A N DI S S U E # 1 1 : P H O T O G R A P H Y A N DP H I L O S O P H YP H I L O S O P H YThe following six essays are intended as three exchanges around three topics—the autonomy

of the photographic image, automatism, and time and meaning—that will be the themes of

three panels in a two-day conference at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, March 13

and 14, 2015.

The conference is sponsored by the museum and by the Mellon Foundation and is being

organized by nonsite.org. We are looking for creative approaches to these themes that will

engage with works in the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection at LACMA. Send

proposals for session papers to nonsite@nonsite.org. Proposals must be submitted by

November 15, 2014.

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F E A T U R E SF E A T U R E S

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T H E M I R A C L E O F A N A L O G YT H E M I R A C L E O F A N A L O G Y

K A J A S I L V E R M A NK A J A S I L V E R M A N

The following text emerges from Kaja Silverman’s forthcoming book The Miracle of Analogy (Stanford

University Press, 2014). The opening section is drawn from the first chapter and the discussion of Niépce from

chapter two. We thank Silverman for her generosity in allowing us to provide a preview of her book.–Editor’s

note

We have grown accustomed to thinking of the camera as an aggressive device: an instrument

for shooting, capturing and representing the world. Since most cameras require an operator,

and it is usually a human hand that picks up the apparatus, points it in a particular direction,

makes the necessary technical adjustments and clicks the camera button, we often transfer this

power to our look. The standardization of this account of photography marked the beginning

of a new chapter in the history of modern metaphysics—the history that began with the cogito,

that seeks to establish man as the “relational center” of all that is, and whose “fundamental

event” is “the conquest of the world as a picture.” 1 It did so by fixing a problem that had

emerged in the previous chapter: the problem posed by human perception. In order to replace

the sky and earth with his mental representations, Descartes had to “call away all of [his]

senses” and “efface even from [his] thoughts all of the images of corporeal things.” 2 His

camera-wielding successor could picture the world—or so he claimed—without closing his

eyes.

When we challenge this account of photography, it is usually by appealing to the medium’s

indexicality. Since an analogue photograph is the luminous trace of what was in front of

the camera at the moment it was made, we argue, it attests to its referent’s reality, just as a

footprint attests to the reality of the foot that formed it. The philosopher from whom we have

inherited the concept of indexicality—Charles Sanders Peirce—uses it to describe both signs

that are linked to an unfolding situation or event, and those that are linked to a prior situation

or event. “I see a man with a rolling gait. This is a probable indication that he is a sailor,” he

writes in “What Is a Sign?.” “I see a man with a rolling gait. This a probable indication that he

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is a sailor… A weathercock indicates the direction of the wind. A sun-dial or a clock indicates the

time of day…[and] a tremendous thunderbolt indicates that something considerable happened,

though we may not know precisely what the event was.” 3

Discussions of photographic indexicality, though, always focus on the past; an analogue

photograph is presumed to stand in for an absent referent—one that is no longer there. 4 A

photograph is “in no way a presence…,” Roland Barthes writes in “The Rhetoric of the Image,”

an influential and widely-read essay from the mid-sixties, “its reality is that of the having-

been-there.” 5 Although Barthes associates the photographic image more with the future

perfect than the past in Camera Lucida, he does not temper the image’s finality; looking at an

1865 photograph of a man awaiting execution, he “shudder[s]” over “a catastrophe which has

already occurred.” 6

This account of the photographic image has rendered it appealing to many artists and

writers. For some, like Walter Benjamin and the young Hans Haacke, it seemed to give

photography an evidentiary power—the power to expose what might otherwise escape

justice. 7 It has justly been said that [Atget] photographed [the empty streets of Paris] like

scenes of crime,” 8 Benjamin writes in Section VII of “The Work of Art,” “A crime scene,

too, is deserted.” Others attribute a memorial value to the photographic image, engaging with

its “pastness” in ways more melancholy than accusatory. For Ana Mendieta, W.G. Sebald,

Tacita Dean and Eduardo Cadava, an analogue photograph is the umbilical cord connecting

us to what we have loved and lost, to what is gone because we failed to save it, or to what

might have been, but now will never be.

But although there have been pitched battles between those who champion the evidentiary

value of the photographic image, and those who emphasize its constructedness, the former is

only another way of overcoming doubt. If a photograph can prove “what was,” then it is the

royal road to certainty—the means through which we know and judge the world. And if what

we see when we look at a photographic image is unalterable, then there is only one thing that

we can do: take “what is dead” or “going to die” into our “arms.” 9 Indexicality wrings all of

the futurity out of the photographic image, extinguishing our last principle of hope. 10

Both of these accounts of the photographic image emerged early in the medium’s history.

In a chilling passage in his 1859 essay, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Oliver

Wendell Holmes not only characterizes the world as a picture, whose essence inheres in its

photographic representability, but suggests that once this essence has been extracted, the

world itself can be thrown away. “Form is henceforth divorced from matter,” this passage

reads, “In fact matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer…Give us a few negatives

of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull

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it down or burn it up, if you please.” 11 In 1857, Lady Eastlake declared that the medium’s

“unerring records in the service of mechanics, engineering, geology, and natural history”

to be “facts of the most sterling and stubborn kind,” and therefore “the sworn witness of

everything presented to [its] view.” 12 And in another passage in the same essay she writes that

“every form that is traced by light is the impress of one moment, or one hour” in the “great

passage of time” (65).

However, as we will see, both Holmes’s and Eastlake’s essays contain many passages that

point in a different direction—that foreground the limits of human vision, that attribute the

photographic image to the world, and that suggest that photography’s truth is disclosive,

rather than evidentiary. Both authors also call it a “gift,” and identify us as the recipients

of this gift. Finally, Lady Eastlake repeatedly characterizes the photographic image as an

emerging image: one that approaches us from the future. And not only are these tropes

ubiquitous in earlier descriptions of the photographic image, they also appear in seventeenth

and eighteenth century descriptions of the camera obscura, and in late nineteenth and early

twentieth century descriptions of painting, writing, and human perception, still attached to

the photographic image. They seriously challenge the ways in which we conceptualize and

periodize photography.

This book is a response to that challenge. Photography is—as I hope to

demonstrate—radically anti-Cartesian. It shows us that there really is a world, that it wants

to be seen by us, and that it exceeds our capacity to know it. Photography also shows

us that the world is structured by analogy, and helps us find our place within it. When

I say “analogy,” I do not mean sameness, symbolic equivalence, logical adequation, or

even a rhetorical figure—like a metaphor or a simile—in which one term functions as

the provisional placeholder for another. I am talking, rather, about the “vast similitude”

that Walt Whitman describes in a famous passage from Leaves of Grass. “A vast similitude

interlocks all/,” this passage reads, “All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons,

planets,/All distances of place however wide, /All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

/All souls, all bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,/All gaseous,

watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,/All nations, colors, barbarisms,

civilizations, languages,/All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any

globe,/All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future….” 13

I quoted this passage in its entirety because it anticipates everything I have to say about

analogy. Each of us is connected through similarities that are neither of our making or our

choosing to countless other beings. We cannot extricate ourselves from these relationships,

because there is no such thing as an individual; the smallest unit of Being is two interlocking

terms. There is also nowhere else to go. Analogy runs through everything-that-is like a shuttle

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through a loom, weaving its threads into the All, or what I call the “world.” But this does not

mean that there is no dissent. Analogies contain difference as well as similarity—sometimes

in small proportions, but sometimes in such large proportions that they seem at risk of

falling apart. The world is also an untotalizable totality, because it is in a constant state of

transformation. Since analogy prevents similar things from collapsing into, and disparate

things from going their separate ways, it is ontologically democratizing. Everything matters.

Since we refuse to acknowledge most of the analogies that link us to others, our ontological

equality seldom translates into social equality, and might therefore seem irrelevant. However,

these analogies destabilize all of our hierarchies, and undermine all of our antitheses. The

world also sends us constant reminders that there is another kind of relationality. These

reminders are photographs—either literally, or by other means. Photography is able to

disclose the world, show us that it is structured by analogy, and help us assume our place

within it because it, too, is analogical. A negative analogizes its referent, the positive prints that

are generated from it, and all of its digital offspring. It also moves through time, in search of

other “kin.” We are no more the authors of these analogies than we are of those that define us;

the photographic image is an ontological calling card—the vehicle through which the world

presents itself to us, and reveals us to ourselves.

The most classic way of responding to an analogy that ones does not want to acknowledge is

either to treat its similarity as “sameness,” or its difference as “otherness.” Most of us have

done this so often that we are no longer able to perceive either quality when it falls below

a certain level. In the last chapter of Flesh of My Flesh, I argued that Gerhard Richter renews

our capacity to apprehend small differences as differences by making paintings that analogize

photographs, and that he includes photography in these analogies because there is something

inherently photographic about this kind of relationship. The analogies that link one print of

a negative to all of the other prints of the same negative also turn on variations so slight that

we have a hard time seeing them, and many photographs are startlingly “like” their referents.

I address this sort of analogy here as well, but I am more concerned with analogies in which

there is an overwhelming amount of difference, and that are held together though reversible

reversals, or what Merleau-Ponty calls “chiasmus.” This is also a quintessentially photographic

kind of analogy. Photography models it for us through the inversion and lateral reversal of

the camera obscura’s image-stream, the positive print’s reversal of the reversal through which

its negative was made, the two-way street leading from the space of the viewer to that of the

stereoscopic image, cinema’s shot/reverse shot formation, and the cross-temporal practices

of some contemporary artists. I say “model” because we, too, are bound to each other

through reversible reversals, and because it is there, and only there, that the promise of social

happiness can still be glimpsed.

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Not only is the photographic image an analogy, rather than a representation or an index,

analogy is also the fluid in which the so-called “medium” of photography develops—and

often in unexpected directions. This process does not begin when we decide that it should,

or end when we command it to. Photography develops, rather, with us, and in response to us. It

assumes historically-legible forms, and when we divest them of their saving power, generally

by imputing them to ourselves, it goes elsewhere. The earliest of these forms was the pinhole

camera, which was more “found” than invented. It morphed into the optical camera obscura,

was reborn as chemical photography, migrated into literature and painting, and lives on in a

digital form. It will not end until we do.

***

As we have already seen [earlier in chapter 2], Daguerre was not interested in reproduction;

his photographs were “one of a kind.” Although Fox Talbot invented the process that

allowed multiple positive prints to be made from a negative, that was not what drew him

to photography either. He was slow to deploy it, and when he finally began to “reverse” his

“reversed” images, as he called them, he did so by placing a sheet of sensitized paper directly

on the negative, and exposing it to light. Since this procedure had to be repeated every time

he wanted a positive print, and nothing about it was standardized, the resulting images are far

from identical and he defends their differences in The Pencil of Nature. 14

The only one of the three figures I have discussed in this chapter who thought of photography

as a primarily reproductive medium was Niépce. He tried to use it to copy engravings, to

“take” what he saw when he looked out of his study window, and—finally–to make prints of

View from a Window. The first of these attempts led to a few recognizable images, the second

to one that is barely legible, and the third to nothing at all. Niépce attributed his inability to

reproduce View from a Window to the “metallic reflection” of the pewter plate, and thought

that he would be able to “obtain a vigorous picture” from a glass plate, but history suggests

otherwise. 15 In the years since Niépce removed the photograph from the camera obscura,

and washed it with lavender and white petroleum, there have been numerous attempts to

reproduce it, none of which has succeeded.

In 1827, Niépce went to England to visit Claude, who was gravely ill, and he took View

from a Window with him. While he was there, he met Francis Bauer, a well-known botanical

draughtsman, who encouraged him to write a memoir about his discovery for presentation to

the Royal Society. Niépce wrote the memoir, but he was so secretive about his process that

nothing came of it. 16 He left View from a Window with Bauer when he returned to France, and

after Bauer’s death it passed through several other hands. It was publicly exhibited in 1885

and 1898, and then passed into obscurity. 17

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Helmut and Alison Gernsheim spent six years trying to track down View from a Window, and

in 1952 they finally found what they were looking for, in a large trunk in England. When

he first saw the photograph, Gernsheim recounts in his most comprehensive account of this

discovery, 18 he thought that he was looking at a mirror in an Empire frame. He went to

the window, and angled the plate in various directions, and eventually the image came into

view. Astonishingly, given that Gernsheim wrote this essay more than half a century after

the industrialization of photography, he attributes its appearance to the courtyard, rather than

Niépce’s action, or his own intervention. He also suggests that this self-disclosure happened

gradually; the “entire courtyard scene unfolded itself in front of my eyes,” he observes (my

emphasis). 19

Gernsheim persuaded the owner of the heliograph to donate it to his extensive photography

collection, and immediately tried to photograph it, but all that appeared in the resulting images

was his camera. He then asked Scotland Yard to help him reproduce it, reasoning that since

its photographers were “so expert in detecting invisible spots, scratches, hair, and fingerprints

where the eye can see nothing at all,” making a copy of a “clearly recognizable image”

should be “easy game.” When Britain’s famous detective agency declined to put its public

services to private uses, he turned first to the Times, where the project was deemed to be

“impossible,” and then to the National Gallery, whose highly skilled photographers tried, but

failed, to reproduce View from a Window. Finally, thinking that the “giants of the photographic

industry” would feel “in honor bound to produce a result,” Gernsheim approached the

Research Laboratory of the Eastman Kodak Company in Harrow, and the director agreed

to try. But although the Eastman Kodak technicians worked on the project for three weeks,

Gernsheim found the resulting photograph a “gross distortion of the original,” and prohibited

its publication until 1977. 20

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As we can see from the first institution to which he first turned for help—Scotland

Yard—Gernsheim imputed an evidentiary value to the photographic image. He believed that

a photograph of View from a Window would document this “important document,” and he

approached the heliograph itself in the same way. “Though Niépce’s estate, Gras, was altered

to some extent by later owners, the tower (pigeon house) on the left of the photograph still

stands, and is in fact on the left when looking out of the window of Niépce’s attic workroom,”

he writes in The History of Photography, “a proof that a prism was used when taking the

photograph. These two facts make it quite certain that the view cannot have been taken before

1826” (59). This passage recalls those in which Niépce tried to align his photographs with

what he saw when he looked out of his workroom window.

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In 1963, Gernsheim gave View from a Window to the Harry Ransom Center at the University

of Texas, Austin, and in June 2002, the Center sent it to the Getty Conservation Institute

to be examined and reproduced. The Institute’s technicians adopted an even more forensic

approach to the photograph. They spent “a day and a half with the original heliograph

in their photographic studios in order to record photographically and digitally all aspects

of the plate.” They also documented it “under all manner of scientific lights, including

ultraviolet spectra,” and “produced new color film and digital/electronic copies of the plate,

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in an attempt to reveal more of the unretouched image while still providing a sense of the

complex physical state of the photograph.” 21 But the digital images that are displayed on the

Harry Ransom Center website are no more revealing of the “unretouched image” than the

Kodak photograph is. And the curators seem to understand this, because they are constantly

changing these images.

Gernsheim and the Getty technicians attribute the heliograph’s unreproducibility to Niépce’s

underexposure of the original plate. This explanation, however, is unnecessary, because there

is no blame to apportion. The Kodak photograph and all of the images that have appeared

on the John Ransom website Center website are not “bad copies,” or even “representations

of representations” 22; they are, rather, some of the analogies through which the heliograph

has continued to self-develop. This creative evolution began with a non-photographic image,

and gained momentum through another unholy alliance: a “manipulated” photograph of an

over-painted photograph.

When Gernsheim realized that he would have to surrender the heliograph to a “research

laboratory” in order to have it reproduced, he decided to make a drawing of it in the same

scale, so that he would have a record of the “crucial document” if something happened to

it. We do not usually attribute evidentiary value to a drawing, and this one warrants no

exception. Instead of an elusive image hidden in the illusionistic depths of a shiny pewter

plate, it is a legible sketch on a flat sheet of non-reflective paper. It also privileges line over

mass, and reverses the photograph’s tonal values. But this does not mean that the heliograph

and the drawing are two separate images. The shapes in the drawing echo those in the

heliograph, and the heliograph also resembles the drawing in some surprising ways. View

from a Window would be as useless in a court of law as the drawing; it corresponded with the

ceaselessly-changing scene outside Niépce’s window on the day it was made, rather than to it.

It was also drawn with a ”pencil”: the pencil of light. These are aspects of the photograph

that we would not see without Gernsheim’s drawing. View from a Window reasserts itself as

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heliograph—a gift from the world to us—in an astonishing way: through an image drawn with

a human hand.

When the Kodak technicians failed to produce a satisfactory copy of View from a Window,

Gernsheim had nowhere else to go, so he and his wife spent nearly two days applying

pointillist water-color dots to one of their prints, so as to make it more representative of

the heliograph. When he photographed this over-painted photograph, he “held back the

sky, the roof of the barn, and a few other features that were bright in the original, not

black.” Gernsheim was keenly aware of the differences between the heliograph and this

image. His photograph of the over-painted photograph is “a more uniform and clearly defined

image” than the Kodak print, he writes in “The 150th

Anniversary of Photography,” but its

“pointillistic effect” is “completely alien” to Niépce’s medium,” which is “as smooth as a

mirror.” However, he nevertheless called it the “rare original” in his 1952 account of his study,

and mandated that it be the heliograph’s primary representative for twenty-five years.

Much later, after this “ruse” was discovered, Gernsheim responded to his critics in the

following way: “Because it became known that that I had touched up Kodak’s reproduction

some people ignorant of the original plate, misconstrued my intention, believing I had been

trying to improve on Niépce, whereas I had merely been trying to improve upon Kodak, to

restore Niépce.” The word “intention” figures prominently here; it is, indeed, the pivot on

which his defense turns. Gernsheim’s detractors imputed the wrong intention to him, he

argues, and when they realize that he was merely trying to reassert Niépce’s intention, they will

exonerate him. But not only can we never fully know what anyone else intends, we can never

fully know what we intend. Gernsheim was also contending with another intentionality, and

one that militated against a return to the ”original”: the photograph’s own impulsion toward

a further self-development. This impulsion was the driving force behind through the many

transformations to which Gernsheim subjected View from a Window. I say “many” because the

drawing and the over-painted photograph weren’t the only analogies generated by Gernsheim.

The entire process began with a mental image or group of images, and when Gernsheim

touched up the photograph, he analogized this analogy. The over-painted photograph is–as

Barbara Brown discreetly puts it–“his approximation of how he felt the original should appear

in reproduction.” 23

Even now, it is to this image that most of us turn when we want to look at View from a Window,

and for good reason. Like the heliograph, it evolved slowly, through the gradual accumulation

of marks. In the former case, as in the latter case, there was also no necessary end-point to

this evolution. Finally, although the heliograph’s “image layer” was long assumed to consist

of a solid coat of bitumen, the Getty’s “XRF analysis” showed that it is actually a random

pattern of bitumen “microdots.” 24 Since Gernsheim died long before the Getty analyzed

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the heliograph, he never knew about these microdots, but they surfaced through his dots of

watercolor paint, like an image in a developing bath.

In spring 2013, an “interactive” version of View from a Window appeared on the John Ransom

Center’s website. It is a digital composite of two other images: Gernsheim’s drawing, and

the most frequently exhibited of the Center’s “high tech” photographs of the heliograph. The

former is superimposed on the latter, and used to divide it into identifiable segments. If one

clicks on a segment, as one is invited to do, its outlines light up with an orange glow, and

the pertinent information appears to the left of the image (e.g., “bakehouse roof, no longer

standing”). This is a continuation of the forensic project begun by Niépe, and renewed by

Gernsheim and the Getty technicians. But once again another intentionality also makes itself

felt. Although the two images that are composited together echo each other, they do not

merge. Some of the lines of the superimposed diagram extend beyond or cut into the shadowy

shapes of the underlying buildings. These discrepancies prevent the image that they both

inhabit from forming a seamless whole. The “interactive” version of View from a Window is

consequently manifestly analogical, and it links chemical photography to digital photography,

as well as drawing.

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A 2005 work by Joan Fontcuberta—Googlegram: Niépce—is another installment in this ongoing

story, and the one with which I will conclude my own narrative. 25 From a distance, Googlegram:

Niépce looks like a blown-up, slightly colorized version of Gernsheim’s over-painted

photograph. As one approaches the work, though, it begins to morph. First the image

becomes less resolute, then it turns into an abstract picture, and eventually it dissolves into a

vast mosaic of tiny jpegs. There are far more images here than our eyes could ever see, even

if we were to spend the rest of our lives looking at them, making Googlegram: Niépce a powerful

reminder of the limits of human vision, and the inexhaustibility of the perceptual world. The

work also challenges our sovereignty in another important way: by exposing us to a multitude

of other intentionalities.

Two of these intentionalities are computational. Fontcuberta begins a Googlegram by locating

an image that is “an icon of our time,” and that is linked to one or more words. He then

conducts a Google image-search with this word or set of words, and reconstitutes the iconic

image with the jpegs to which this search leads through a freeware photomosaic program. 26

The search part of this process ignores both the visual qualities of the images it finds, and their

affinities to each other; it is relentlessly linguistic. But it also treats words as classificatory units,

rather than as sources of meaning, or one of the “houses” of Being. It is thus as impervious

to the complexity of the words with which it searches as it is to the images it finds, and

this leads to all kinds of errors, or what Fontcuberta calls “archive noise.” 27 Although the

photomosaic program is also relentlessly single-minded and indifferent to the images with

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which it works, its “logic” is visual, instead of verbal. It arranges the jpegs strictly according

to their “chromatic value and density.” 28

The iconic image that Fontcuberta refashions in Googlegram: Niépce is of course Gernsheim’s

over-painted photograph, and he searched for its 10,000 jpegs with the words “photo” and

“foto.” Since View from a Window is often called “the first photograph,” on the internet, as in

the classroom, there is an unusually tight connection between it and the search words, but

since every image on the internet is a digital photograph, the search also encompassed all of

them. The photo-mosaic program forged similar links between the over-painted photograph

and these digital photographs. Googlegram: Niépce is a photograph constructed out of 10,000

smaller photographs, found by searching with the words “photo” and “foto,” and assembled

by a photo-mosaic program. There seems to be no room here for anything but these two

meaningless and highly reiterative intentionalities, both of which scream “photography.”

But although a photo-mosaic promotes totality from a distance, it works against it up close,

as do all mosaics, and Fontcuberta is interested in this double optic. He also believes that

the “structure of mosaic”—which dates back to 3000 B.C.–can be found in all photography.

Chemical photography is “an irregular mosaic of silver halogen molecules,” he writes, a

printed image is a “mosaic of dots that inform the photomechanical frame,” and a digital

photograph is “produced by the grey tint of pixels.” 29 As we have already seen, the Getty

technicians also found a mosaic when they analyzed View from a Window, and Gernsheim

brought this mosaic to the surface with his pointillist dots. And not only is Googlegram: Niépce

itself a mosaic, its 10,000 jpegs also render both the bitumen dots in Niépce’s photograph and

the water-color dots in Gernsheim’s over-painted photograph hyper-visible.

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The photo-mosaic program also adds something to the mosaic tradition: something that

makes room for another kind of intentionality. In a conventional mosaic, Fontcuberta writes,

each component is “a pure spot of color without meaning,” but in a photomosaic it is a

photograph, “that still [has] a meaning by [itself].” This meaning isn’t the kind we mobilize

by identifying what is “in” a photograph; it is, rather, the inexhaustible significance that every

being should always have for us, and that the photographic image helps us to experience.

The first time I came close enough to see the sea of faces in Googlegram: Niépce, I had this

experience. I felt that they “expected” my arrival, and that there was a “secret agreement”

between them and me. I also knew–with the kind of knowledge that bypasses all reason—that

this agreement gave them a “claim” on me. 30

Although Fontcuberta does not say so, the 10,000 jpegs that make up Googlegram: Niépce

also have yet another kind of intentionality. When we conduct a Google image-search, the

search engine looks for the images that have been most frequently linked to our search-word.

These links, however, have been forged by other internet users, and reflect their predilections,

antipathies, rivalries and desires, instead of our own. That is why we are so often frustrated by

what the search finds. By running his Google image search through a photomosaic program

that arranged the results according to chromatic value and intensity, Fontcuberta prevented

himself from selecting the jpegs that he liked, and eliminating those that he found alien or

irritating. He opened the door of his work to images that were tagged and uploaded by

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thousands of other users, and in which their affects were still lodged. He did so, I believe,

because the human psyche is another of the places where the photographic image develops.

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N O T E SN O T E S

1. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William

Levitt (Harper: New York, 1977), pp. 128, 134.

2. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1996), p. 70.

3. Charles Sanders Peirce, “What is a Sign?,” in The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1893-1913, ed. The

Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 8.

4. This is also the case with Peirce himself.

5. Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang,

1977), p. 44.

6. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux,

1981), p. 96.

7. I am thinking particularly here of Haacke’s use of photography in Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-

Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. Benjamin maintains that the “hidden political significance” of photography is its

capacity to provide “evidence” in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” See The Selected

Writings of Walter Benjamin: Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p.

108.

8. Ibid, p. 108.

9. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.71.

10. “Principle of Hope” is the name Ernst Bloch gave to his three-volume study of utopian thought.

11. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg

(Leete’s Island Books: New Haven, 1980), pp. 80-81.

12. Lady Eastlake, “Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, p. 65.

13. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas R. Harned, and Horace L. Traubel (New York:

Doubleday, 1902), vol. 2, p. 22.

14. For a detailed account of Fox Talbot’s relationship to photographic reproduction, see Chapter 4.

15. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, “Memoir on Heliography,” published in Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre: The

History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (New York: Dover, 1968), p. 67.

16. “The memoir dated ‘Kew, le 8 Decembre, 1827’ was accompanied by several heliographs,” Gernsheim writes, “which,

however, with the exception of this photograph from nature, were reproductions of engravings. These specimens were

returned to him together with the memoir, for the Royal Society felt unable to take cognizance of an invention, the details

of which the inventor was unwilling to disclose” (The History of Photography, pp. 60-61.

17. Helmut Gernsheim, “The 150th

Anniversary of Photography,” History of Photography, vol. 1, no. 1 (1977), p. 6-7.

KAJA SILVERMAN - THE MIRACLE OF ANALOGY

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18. Gernsheim wrote about his discovery twice–in The Photographic Journal, Section A (May 1952), and in “The 150th

Anniversary of Photography,” in History of Photography, vol. 1, no 1 (1977). The second account is much longer, and is my

primary source of information.

19. Gernsheim, “The 150th

Anniversary of Photography,” p. 7.

20. Ibid., p. 8.

21. I am quoting here from the Harry Ransom Center website (www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/

firstphotograph/conservation/#top).

22. This is how Batchen characterizes the over-painted photograph (p. 127).

23. Barbara Brown, “The First Photograph,” Abbey Newsletter, vol. 26, no. 3 (November 2002). Brown is the Head of

Photograph Conservation at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and participated in the Getty Conservation

Institute’s analysis of the photograph.

24. The Getty Conservation Institute, “Scientific Analysis of World’s First Photograph (www.getty.edu/conservation/

publications_resources/newsletters/17_2/gcinews1.html).

25. Eduardo Cadava and Gabriela Nouzeilles included an exhibition copy of this work in an excellent photography

exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in the fall of 2013, “The Itinerant Languages of Photography.” Cadava

also discusses it in the exhibition catalogue. Both the exhibition and catalogue were devoted to the premise that

photographs cannot be “fixed in a single time and place,” because they “travel from one forum to another,” and because

“with each recontextualization and rereading, they redefine themselves and take on different and expanding significances”

(Cadava and Nouzeilles, “Introduction,” in The Itinerant Languages of Photography [Princeton: Princeton University Art

Museum, 2013], p. 17. In the first essay in the catalogue, Cadava writes that “although Fontcuberta stresses the

intensification of this circulation and itinerancy today in the era of digitization, he also shows [through Googlegram: Niépce]

that this movement has always formed part of the photographic image” (p. 30).

26. For the sake of clarity, I have described the Google search and the photo-mosaic program separately, but the two

operations happened simultaneously. In fact, Fontcuberta ran the Google search through the photo-mosaic program.

27. Fontcuberta, “Archive Noise,” www.fontcuberta.com.

28. Ibid.

29. Fontcuberta, “Googlegrams,” www.fontcuberta.com.

30. I am of course paraphrasing a famous passage from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” in Benjamin,

Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 390.

Kaja Silverman is the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art, and the author of eight books: Flesh of

My Flesh (2009); James Coleman (2002); World Spectators (2000); Speaking About Godard (with Harun Farocki, 1998); The

Threshold of the Visible World (1996); Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992); The Acoustic Mirror; The Female Voice in

Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988); and The Subject of Semiotics (1983). Silverman’s current writing and teaching are focused primarily on

photography, time-based visual art and painting. She is working on two books about photography: “The Miracle of Analogy,” and “The Promise

of Social Happiness.” In “The Miracle of Analogy,” Silverman argues that photography is as old as human civilization, and that it is the

world’s primary way of showing itself to us. In “The Promise of Social Happiness” she addresses the form photography has recently assumed:

large-format digital and analogue images, that are exhibited in museums instead of books, magazines, and private spaces.

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nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated

with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668.

KAJA SILVERMAN - THE MIRACLE OF ANALOGY

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R E S P O N S E T O K A J A S I L V E R M A NR E S P O N S E T O K A J A S I L V E R M A N

T O D D C R O N A NT O D D C R O N A N

In The Miracle of Analogy Kaja Silverman offers nothing less than a rewriting of the history

and theory of photography. Dissatisfied with the two central models of photographic

discourse—the authorial look and the indexical sign, the sovereign subject and

positivism—Silverman proposes a process-based, temporally driven account of photography

as a “mobile, ephemeral and untotalizable flow.” The camera, like perception itself, is a

“dynamic and reciprocal process” of taking and giving likenesses of the world. Silverman

defines photographic ontology as analogical: the negative and the photograph are “equal

terms that are bound together through varying degrees of similarity, and distinguished

through varying degrees of difference.” Photographs are both analogical in structure and

equally analogical in meaning. Writing of Lady Eastlake, Silverman sympathetically observes

how she associates the “photographic image with the disclosure of the world, rather than

its creation.” What is disclosed by the photographic image is the analogical structure of

the world itself. Silverman further cites an unnamed (and anxious) editor, writing in 1839

in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, who “suggested that photography is the world’s way of

revealing itself to us, and of showing us how it wants to be seen—i.e., of awakening us from

our Cartesian dream, and reasserting its primacy.” To begin to awaken from our Cartesian

dream is to acknowledge that there is a world that “exceeds our capacity to know it.” And

because the world itself is analogical, understanding photographic ontology becomes a way of

understanding the world and ourselves in it.

Part of Silverman’s fascination with the work of Nicéphore Niépce stems from his own

interest in photography as a mode of disclosure rather than creation. In the language of the

time, Niépce was the only one of the photographic pioneers who thought of his technique

as a mode of reproduction, rather than original creation (Silverman brilliantly shows how

Louis Daguerre and Fox Talbot, alongside Niépce, should be seen under the terms organized

by the camera obscura). But Silverman’s focus here is not on Niépce’s fated 1827 attempt to

reproduce a view from his window but rather the efforts of those that came after him to

turn the heliographic View from a Window into a photograph. Silverman tells the story of

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Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s sustained engagement with the heliograph over a period

of years. From Scotland Yard, to the Times, to the National Gallery, to Eastman Kodak, to

the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, to the Getty conservation

labs (after Gernsheim’s death), Silverman observes how Gernsheim, following Niépce, was

committed to a vision of photography as a medium for the world’s self-disclosure; it was the

courtyard on that day in 1827, rather than the artist’s hand or mind, that was responsible for

the photograph.

What all of the efforts to photograph the original heliographic image show, what they

express about the work, is that it is unreproducible. Or rather, there is nothing to reproduce,

because the “original” itself is not a representation. All of the images made after the

original—irrespective of medium—are “analogies through which the heliograph has

continued to self-develop.” Gernsheim’s drawing as well as the now-notorious pointillist

over-painting after the heliograph, just like the series of photographs taken of it, are emergent

in the heliograph itself. One can immediately imagine how this account of interpretation

(or should we call it affectivity) could sound suspect to a historian (or to a legal system).

Indeed, when Gernsheim was later accused of doctoring the original with his over-painting

he defended himself on the grounds of intentionality. When pressed, rather than situating

the author in the courtyard, he more conventionally spoke of his effort to “restore Niépce.”

As Silverman argues, intention is the “pivot on which [Gernsheim’s] defense turns.” And

intention is the pivot around which Silverman offers her critique. Silverman warns that “not

only can we never fully know what anyone else intends, we can never fully know what we

intend.” Heidegger’s “unthought,” Lacan’s “desire,” Merleau-Ponty’s “invisible” all point to

this concealed point of production. I would add Freud’s “unconscious” to this list, but I

would also say that what distinguishes Freud’s account, and this is made explicit in his writings

(and, I would argue, in the Heideggerian account as well), is that the unconscious is the site

of intentionality. What one really intends is often happening below the level of conscious

awareness. But Silverman offers something more than the unconscious as the site of what we

might call nondiscursive intentionality. There is another, more fundamental, and less human,

expressive center. We read that Gernsheim was contending with the photograph’s intentionality,

its “own impulsion toward a further self-development.” Gernsheim, it turns out, responded

to something true about the heliograph, although something occurring far beyond normative

modes of perceptual awareness. The Getty XRF analysis showed that the heliograph is

composed of innumerable “microdots,” which retroactively justifies Gernsheim’s own

pointillist production as responsive to the work’s intentionality. Then again, there’s a sense

in which everything that emerges in response to the heliograph—photographs, drawing,

overpaintings, but also the mental and tactile images associated with it—are expressions of

the heliograph, or rather the world’s, intentionality. A difficulty emerges here. What constitutes

TODD CRONAN - RESPONSE TO KAJA SILVERMAN

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a response to the heliograph and what a random fact associated with it? If everything that

happens when one is exposed to the heliograph is an expression of it, then the work seems to

open onto causality (and the work itself disappears). To put it another way, what, if anything,

constitutes the difference between a “creative” evolution based in the heliograph, one with

“no necessary end-point” and a causal sequence generated by it and the world, which necessarily

has no end-point? What is the difference between an analogy and an affect? Or is there a

difference between them? At stake in this distinction, for me, is the capacity to disagree with

an “interpretation” of an image, to be able to disagree about what we think someone might

have meant (even if they could not articulate it themselves).

Silverman concludes her account with a discussion of Joan Fontcuberta’s Googlegram: Niépce

of 2005, a work featured in Eduardo Cadava’s and Gabriela Nouzeilles’ important Itinerant

Languages of Photography of 2013-14. Like the heliographic work it responds to, Fontcuberta’s

Googlegram “challenges our sovereignty…by exposing us to a multitude of other

intentionalities.” That Silverman is fundamentally concerned with an ethical relation, of

the encounter with other intentionalities, and thus an encounter with the limits of one’s

subjectivity, is essential. What is harder to construe is how one could be wrong, irresponsible,

in one’s encounter with the other (which includes oneself). How exactly does one differentiate

an analogical encounter with one’s concealed “kin” and a repressive projection of oneself as

the other? These issues emerge centrally for me with Silverman’s account of Fontcuberta’s

Googlegram.

Googlegram is constructed of 10,000 smaller photographs discovered by conducting an internet

search with the words “photo” and “foto” (why these two languages?) and assembled by

a photo-mosaic program. The mosaic structure of the work enforces a “double optic”

approach: from a distance it promotes “totality,” while up-close it dissolves into particularized

dots. Unlike a traditional mosaic, where the individual bits of glass are “without meaning,”

in the photomosaic it is 10,000 tiny photographs “that still have a meaning by themselves.”

But that meaning cannot be a version of the meaning we traditionally expect from works of

art. It is happening at the work’s microstructure, beyond or below the level of perceptual

awareness. The meaning we experience at the microstructure, the encounter with seemingly

innumerable others, expresses the “inexhaustible significance that every being should always

have for us, and that the photographic image helps us to experience.” Silverman describes

the receptive experience of “inexhaustible significance” as the sensation of “expectation,”

as though there were a “‘secret agreement’ between them and me.” It is an experience that

“bypasses all reason” but that nonetheless, or only by virtue of its presence, exerts a “‘claim’”

on the viewer.

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In Silverman’s concluding paragraph she suggests that Fontcuberta himself, in the making

of the work, exposed himself by virtue of the photomosaic program and not his (conscious)

intentions, to the innumerable “affects” lodged in the images he (or the computer) selected.

The chain of affects is unlimited: from viewer, to maker, to work, to medium, to world we

are embedded in a flow of meaning. Photography helps us to see and to feel what we are but

cannot know. Then again, knowing when to trust our feelings—when we feel them to be right

and not just ours—is not just a matter of affect, but of assertion, about what we think others

could have meant. Not knowing what they could have meant does not mean they did not

mean something or that we cannot know it. Properly acknowledging one’s “kin” requires that

we risk the public and corrigible claim to understanding what was said.

Todd Cronan is Associate Professor of art history at Emory University. He is the author of Against Affective Formalism:

Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2014) and articles on photographic "previsualization," Brecht,

Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Santayana, Simmel, Valéry and Richard Neutra. He is currently at work on three book projects.

The first, with Judith Sheine, Modernism at the Edge of the World: The Architecture of R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra. A second,

on the origins of media theory and politics from The Bauhaus to Kittler, When the Medium Became the Message: The Bauhaus and

the Invention of Media Politics and a third volume on art and politics between the war on Rodchenko, Eisenstein and Brecht.

nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated

with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668.

TODD CRONAN - RESPONSE TO KAJA SILVERMAN

33

T H E F O R C E O F A F R A M E :T H E F O R C E O F A F R A M E :O W E N K Y D D ' S D U R A T I O N A L P H O T O G R A P H SO W E N K Y D D ' S D U R A T I O N A L P H O T O G R A P H S

W A L T E R B E N N M I C H A E L SW A L T E R B E N N M I C H A E L S

“it has the force of a frame to a picture.”*

–Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition

Owen Kydd makes videos that he calls “durational photographs.” What makes them seem

like photographs is that the camera itself is fixed, focused on say, a store window or

a black plastic bag. But they’re different from still photographs because they depict

motion—sometimes very little (the reflection of the lights of passing cars in a window),

sometimes quite a lot (the plastic bag blown by the wind). Because of the motion, Kydd

himself says there is a sense in which they’re “cinema,” but since, as he also says, the screens

make it possible to depict motion without the projection and the darkened room that turns

even a gallery into a theatre, there’s also a sense in which they make possible a kind of refusal

of cinema. 1 It’s thus the photographic and the cinematic that provide the terms in which

Kydd understands his work, and inasmuch as the videos are neither photographs nor movies,

video functions for him less as a medium in itself than as a technology for addressing the

relation between the photograph and the movie, for, more precisely, turning the cinematic

into the photographic.

Thirty-five years ago (when Kydd was, like, two) it might have been tempting to describe this

vexing the question of what medium he works in as an example of the postmodern critique

of medium specificity, the “destruction,” in Rosalind Krauss’s words, of “the conditions of

the aesthetic medium.” 2 Today, however, it’s Krauss’s subsequent call for the “reinvention

of the medium” that seems more relevant, since Kydd’s interest in the relation between the

photograph and the cinema works more to complicate the specificity of the medium than to

destroy it. But where the point for Krauss of the call to reinvent “the idea of the medium” has

been to defend what she calls the “necessary plurality of the arts,” “a plural condition,” as she

puts it, “that stands apart from any philosophically unified idea of Art” (305), it will, I want to

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argue, be hard to describe Kydd’s practice as appealing to the plurality of the medium against

Art; on the contrary, it will be better understood as doing just the opposite, as redeploying the

idea of the medium precisely on behalf of the idea of Art—and against a pluralism that is not

only aesthetic but political.

We can begin to see how this works first by noting the distinction mobilized by Kydd between

the materiality of these works and their aesthetic. The reason it makes sense to call them

durational photographs, the reason why the medium to which they have a relation is the

photograph, is first, as I’ve already noted, because the camera is fixed and, second, because the

point of the fixed camera—the use to which it’s put—is the creation of a picture. And what

determines the picture as a picture is the establishment of its frame, which will be essential not

only to the unity of the work as a kind of photograph but to the very idea of art that Krauss

deplores.

This absolute centrality of the frame is most immediately visible in a piece like Composition

Warner Studio (on green) (even though the occasional violence of its movement makes it look

less like a still photo than many of the others) precisely because the crucial (let’s say defining)

moments in that piece – the ones that punctuate the passing of time, that insist on the

photograph’s durationality—are the moments in which the edges of the bag are blown outside

and then back inside the frame.

What a video (but not a still) camera can do, of course, is follow the motion, a capability that’s

absolutely central to cinema (it’s partly this capability Kydd is insisting on when he suggests

that technically his work is cinema) and that makes the question of the frame in moving

pictures very different from what it is in the still. The moving camera subordinates the frame

to the shot. What I mean here is just that it’s a crucial fact about cinema (to stick with Kydd’s

term) not just that the camera can record motion but also that while recording motion it can

itself move, and that this fundamentally alters (one might say, all things being equal, removes

the pressure on) our sense of the frame. Whereas what Kydd insists on in Composition is just

this pressure. Everything that happens in Composition happens in relation to the frame; the top

and bottom of the bag moving closer to or farther away from the frame, the left side going

out and then coming back in. So although one might imagine this transgression of the frame

as functioning to weaken it, in fact, it functions to strengthen it. If what you wanted were

really to weaken the frame you could just get rid of it altogether by following the motion of

the bag with the camera. And this is what I mean by saying that the work seeks to function

as a picture. It seeks to assert that what it is (what it is of) is determined by its frame. It’s

not just that someone watching that bag blown about would not see what the beholder of

the work sees (would not see it moving in and out of the frame); it’s that the event I just

described—moving in and out of the frame—would not even be taking place. The function of

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the frame, in other words, is more ontological than epistemological; it doesn’t just determine

what we can see, it determines what happens.

The force of this determination is even more visible in another more complicated work, the

diptych, Marina and the Yucca. What makes it complicated is its relation to the portrait—to

the problematic of the pose and to the psychological ambitions of the portrait. But, setting

these aside for today, I want to stick with the question of the frame, and to do so by noting

the difference between this video portrait and probably the most important video portraits

of the last 25 years, the ones in which Thomas Struth asks his subjects to sit still for him for

an hour and in which they struggle to do so. In the Struths, that struggle is at the center of

the work, made especially vivid when, for example, Struth’s close friend, the brilliant classical

guitarist Frank Bungarten, actually gets up and walks away in something like exasperation.

By contrast, Marina seems barely to feel the pressure of posing. And in fact, she’s not under

much pressure; where Struth’s subjects sit facing the camera for an hour, Marina is shown

looking down, eyes shut or almost shut and only for two minutes. Of course, unlike the

cactus, she feels what it means to be photographed and presumably if she had to sit for a

full hour, the effect would be different but in her mere two minutes she seems almost to

escape the problematic of the pose, to be more like the cactus than like Frank Bungarten. In

this sense, at least, Kydd’s durational photographs are a lot less durational than Struth’s video

portraits.

At the same time, however, because the work is shown in repeating loops, the passage of time

is particularly or distinctively marked. Where in Struth, the passage of time for the subject of

the video is identical to the passage of time for its beholder (if the video portraits were to

run continuously, no one would be expected to sit through more than one showing), even

in just a 7 minute 19 second showing, Marina and the Yucca repeats three times—which is to

say the work is organized by the repeats, by an internal structuring of time not paralleled in

the experience of the viewer. The effect is thus to separate the time of viewing from the time

of performance, a separation that becomes all the more crucial if one takes seriously Kydd’s

remark that ideally he’d like his videos to be playing continuously all the time and thus to

“have a presence on the wall like that of a painting or photograph.” 3 The difference between

the still and the durational photograph remains, but here duration is placed under the sign of

stillness—it’s made to happen as much as possible within the photograph rather than in the

experience either of the subject or the beholder.

And this act of separation is reinforced by a relation to the frame different from but in its

own way even more striking than that in Composition. Partly this emerges in relation to the

other picture in the diptych, but what I want to focus on here is the movement (in context,

an almost violent one) that everyone registers at the beginning of the second loop. What the

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beginning of the new loop makes visible is that Marina has been gradually and almost invisibly

slumping just a little during the two minutes the camera has been on her, and it does so by

restoring her to the position she was in at the start. Thematically, we might say, this is striking

because it alters our experience of the relation between the still cactus and the almost equally

still young woman. If she has seemed as untouched by the problematic of the pose as the

cactus, it’s her difference from the cactus, the fact of her embodiment that’s now insisted

upon. At the same time, however, there’s no sense of the work’s interest in her interiority.

It’s the fact that she has a body, not her particular individuality, not what she is thinking or

feeling, that is registered here. In this sense, the diptych seeks to foreground her personhood

without in any way interesting itself in her personality, a gesture that has its own interest.

But, however we understand Marina’s movement downward, her movement upward is very

different since, of course, she never does move upward. Rather, that movement is constituted

entirely by the video, which here asserts its separation from—or, to use a more loaded

aesthetic term, its autonomy from—its subject (it produces a motion that she does not) to

complement what we’ve already described (in its internal structuring of the passage of time)

as its autonomy from the viewer. What’s striking here is that a literal account of the medium

specificity of the photograph (its indexicality, the Barthesian “that has been” of its relation

to the event) is refused and replaced by a formal one (its frame, its determination of the

represented event by the representation). And this is what I meant by saying earlier that in

Kydd, something like what Krauss calls the reinvention of the medium is deployed on behalf

of rather than as a critique of the idea of art. The commitment to producing an aesthetic of

the photograph out of the material of the video—and thus to invigorating the concept of the

frame—functions precisely to make the kind of general claim about art (“Art”) that Krauss

deplores: to assert its autonomy.

Perhaps then we should be worried that Kydd’s work is the kind of art that George Baker

(Krauss’s former student, and a little less sanguine than she is about the renewal of interest

in medium specificity) warns us against when he worries that the “ breaking” of the

“postmodernist and interdisciplinary taboo” against the medium “has let loose a series of…

conservative appeals to medium-specificity, a return to traditional artistic objects and practices

and discourses, that we must resist.” 4

But it’s hard to see what’s conservative about this practice as art and, although a commitment

to the autonomy of the work has sometimes been identified with a political conservatism,

it’s even harder to see how that can be true today. In fact, it has been the challenge to

the frame—what we might call the emergence of the postmodern more generally—that has

functioned as the way artists do conservative politics in our period.

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We can get a preliminary sense of what this means just by noting that the rise of the

postmodern has been more or less coterminous with the rise of neoliberalism and with two

sets of social and economic conditions. One is what the poet Maggie Nelson describes as the

“triple liberations” of the Civil Rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the gay

rights movement. 5 And although probably no one imagines that the equality for which these

movements struggle has been achieved, probably also no one imagines that there hasn’t been

significant change for the better. Just to take a very current and local example (the case is

about to go before a judge here in Detroit 6), today same sex marriage is legal in only 16 states

(and Michigan is not yet one of them)—not so good. But at the time of Stonewall (1969)

same-sex marriage was unthought of, and same-sex sex was illegal. In Michigan, until the

Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), a sodomy conviction could be punished

by fifteen years of imprisonment.

The other relevant change with respect to equality has been economic. But here, of course,

the question is not how much better things are but, as the well-known graph below

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suggests, how much worse. In fact, economic inequality in 2012 was not only much worse

than it was in the late 60s and early 70s, it was worse than it’s ever been in American history.

And the median household income in Detroit today is less than half what it was in 1970. 7 If

we were using Nancy Fraser’s terms, we could say (what Fraser says) that progress has been

made with respect to questions of recognition but not with respect to redistribution. The way

I myself would put it would be to say that progress has been made with respect to questions

of discrimination but not with respect to the question of exploitation. Where inequality has

taken the form of our seeing difference as inferiority (of racism or sexism or homophobia),

we have fought it; where the difference actually is inferiority we have allowed it to flourish.

Obviously a lot could be said about these changes and about their relation to each other

(and on this topic Fraser’s views and mine would be different, since I would argue that

our current commitment to anti-discrimination functions to legitimate exploitation) but the

relevant question here is only their relation to Owen Kydd’s durational photographs. Not,

obviously to the subjects of these photographs—there’s nothing about that plastic bag that

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speaks to the question of women’s rights or Detroit’s bankruptcy. But instead to the question

of the frame, which, I want to say, does.

How? If we just remind ourselves of what the critique of the medium and thus of the frame

entails, we can see right away its alignment with Nelson’s three liberations and with the

commitment to anti-discrimination more generally. For what the frame does is separate the

work from its subject and thus at the same time from its audience, and what the critique of

the frame does is refuse that separation and insist instead on the centrality of the beholder’s

response. What we see, how we feel, become crucial components of the work and thus

it’s possible for the normativizing gaze (white, male, straight/racist, sexist, homophobic)

to become a crucial object of both aesthetic and social critique. After all, the problem of

discrimination is in its essence nothing but a problem about how we see and respond—no

racism without racists, no homophobia without homophobes. The appeal to the viewer

produces the principle of neoliberal justice.

The frame, by contrast, makes everything outside the work and in particular our response

to the work irrelevant. Defined by its internal relations (remember Marina’s little thrust

upwards), the theory of itself that a work like Marina and the Yucca produces is of a structure

that cannot be altered by our perception of it. And the image it offers is of a society organized

not by the irreducible centrality of our subject positions but by their irrelevance, not by the

conflicts between black and white, straight and gay, male and female and the problem of

discrimination but by the conflict between labor and capital and the problem of exploitation.

Every time the edge of that bag blows into and out of the frame, every time you experience

your own irrelevance to the determination of what is and is not part of the work, you are

offered the opportunity to understand what it means for it to be autonomous and for you to

belong to a society structured by class. 8

This is finally what’s at stake in Krauss’s identifying the return of the medium with a defense

of the “plural condition”—of the “necessary plurality of the arts” as against a “philosophically

unified idea of Art.” Pluralism is contemporary liberalism’s utopian ideal, a social field

composed of identities demanding not to be discriminated against and cultures seeking to be

acknowledged. The arts here, reinventing the differences between them by reclaiming their

relation to the medium, are called upon to provide an emblem of that ideal, of difference as

a mode of equality. But the medium in Kydd does not defend the plural; its use is just the

opposite—to assert not only a philosophically unified idea of art but an idea of art as the form

of philosophical unity. And in so doing, it makes visible a very different social structure, one

that reconfigures difference as contradiction, understands inequality as its essence. What it

produces may not quite be a class politics, but it is at least a class aesthetic.

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That’s why that plastic bag looks more like the city of Detroit today than do even the most

beautiful pictures of its ruins.

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N O T E SN O T E S

*This essay was written as part of the run-up to the Mellon-sponsored nonsite/LACMA

conference on photography that will take place in March 2015, and, in its final form, will

further explore questions about the medium of photography and the question of portraiture

in relation to Kydd, Struth and some of the major works (e.g. by Sander) in LACMA’s Vernon

collection. This version, however, was originally presented as a talk at the ASAP conference in

Detroit (October 2013) and I have, for reasons that are perhaps obvious, wanted to preserve

the marks of that occasion.

1. Charlotte Cotton, Interview with Own Kydd http://www.aperture.org/blog/interview-with-owen-kydd/ April 2, 2013.

2. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999): 289-305; see page 290. The discussion

of the critique of the medium is retrospective, as is photography’s identification in the ’60s and ’70s with a whole series of

what Krauss calls “ontological cave-ins” (290), the critique of the author or artist, of the “original” and its “supposed

unity,” etc. The call for the medium’s reinvention is correspondingly prospective but not, of course, a call for the

reinvention also of the author, the original, etc.

3. In conversation, Los Angeles, 2011.

4. George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October 114 (Fall 2005): 120-140, see page 138. Perhaps a useful way of

describing Kydd’s work here would be by antithesis to what Baker calls the “cinematic photograph” and its expression of

what he calls the desire to “expand” photography’s “terms into a more fully cultural arena” (132). A piece like Composition

seeks rather to render cinema photographic, and it’s by separating itself from the “cultural arena”—by insisting on its

internal rather than its external relations—that it pursues what I will describe below as in effect a class aesthetic.

5. Maggie Nelson, Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press: Iowa City, 2007), xxiii.

6. On October 16, the U.S. District Court Judge in Detroit set Feb. 25, 2014 as the date on which he would begin hearing

testimony to determine whether there was a legitimate state interest in banning same-sex marriage.

7. The median household income in Detroit today is a little over $26,000, down (in 2010 dollars) from over $56,000 in 1970.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/02/politics-counts-how-detroit-is-different/

8. For further discussions of the political meaning of autonomy today, see Jennifer Ashton, Poetry and the Price of Milk

http://nonsite.org/article/poetry-and-the-price-of-milk; Nicholas Brown, The Work of Art in the Age of its Real Subsumption

Under Capital http://nonsite.org/editorial/the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-its-real-subsumption-under-capital. And one can

find related discussions all over nonsite.org, especially in the contributions of Todd Cronan and in a text like Charles

Palermo’s Miró’s Politics http://nonsite.org/feature/miros-politics. For some of my own contributions, see “The Politics of a

Good Picture: Race, Class, and Form in Jeff Wall’s Mimic.” PMLA 125.1(2010): 177-184 and Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière and

the Form of the Photograph http://nonsite.org/issue-1/neoliberal-aesthetics-fried-ranciere-and-the-form-of-the-photograph

Walter Benn Michaels is currently at work on a manuscript called The Beauty of a Social Problem. His books include The Gold

Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century; Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism;

The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History; and The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore

Inequality. Recent articles—some on literature, some on photography, and some on politics—have appeared in such journals

as PMLA, New Labor Forum, and Le Monde diplomatique.

nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated

with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668.

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R E : R E S P O N S E T O W A L T E R B E N NR E : R E S P O N S E T O W A L T E R B E N NM I C H A E L SM I C H A E L S

M A R G A R E T O L I NM A R G A R E T O L I N

To: Charles Palermo

Department of Art and Art History

The College of William and Mary

Re: Response to Walter Benn Michaels

January 18, 2014

Dear Charles,

I haven’t seen Owen Kydd’s “durational photographs,” but Walter Benn Michaels’s reading

them is a fascinating example of the attempt to wring meaning out of seemingly mute

elements of form. I have always been drawn to the modernist effort to do so, pursued in

multiple ways by critics, theorists and art historians from G.F. Hegel to Alois Riegl, Arnold

Hauser and beyond. 1 Such formal grammar makes art into a visual, hence seemingly direct

way of saying something. It brings to bear the most hermetic aspects of form, like the visual

discourse on framing—on the gritty reality of exploitation and rising economic inequality.

Does a society recognize difference, celebrate hybridity, seek to deny the difference between

one class and another, between life and art? Does the work represent class structure or

attitudes toward authority through the arrangement of its elements, the color, light and shade

of its surface? Does art perform an “aesthetic of class” when it demands its autonomy and

shuts out the viewer? Or does something in the form of the work encourage the gallery-

goer to enact a performance that might result in her rethinking the way she sees, change the

way she regards her relation to the world, or abandon some well-worn assumption? Can this

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metaphoric reenactment of the relation of the viewer to the work affect the future of that

relation and help effect change?

These relations, performances and interpretations depend on discourse. While by tweaking

the form one way or another different meanings can be coaxed out of the same form

simultaneously, resulting in a range of variations, discourse itself is always historical. Thirty-

five years ago “(when Kydd was, like, two)” it would have been tempting (to Michaels) to

describe the probing of the question of medium in his work as the postmodern critique

of medium specificity. Twenty two years ago (when Kydd was, like, fifteen) it would have

been tempting (for me) to discuss Kydd’s work in terms of the awkward collision of two

desires, the desire for the autonomy of art, and the desire to make art that can have an

effect in the world outside of art. 2 But for both of us the discourse of art has changed.

For Michaels the “reinvention of the medium” seems more to the point. For me, because

I thought that artists no longer have to struggle with and against the axioms of modernism

(art’s autonomy) it seems more appropriate to talk about how difficult it is to speak in one

conversation (medium) when another is pulling you in a different direction. The pull of

competing discourses is like the pull of competing narratives.

It would have been wonderful to tease out narratives in Kydd’s works. They might prompt

questions like what is the minimum movement sufficient to form a narrative? or how trivial

can that movement be and still affect the narrative? Perhaps in the case of Yukka Black and

White and Marina, the moment when Marina appears to jerk upward would be the focus of

my reading as it was for Michaels’s. But I might see the epiphany as related to the turn in the

narrative that would show how watching a narrative differs from gazing at a still picture. It

would be a decisive moment in the face of which everything prior to it must be rethought.

We thought the piece was about looking at movement as though it were a still image but now

it is about failing to identify the conditions under which we were looking at the “durational

photograph.” To go further, the subject of the narrative could be what we fail to notice even

when we are looking closely over time, thus querying the limits of close examination. Perhaps,

given that in the case of Marina, the subject is a person, it could be about the failure to notice,

even when looking closely at a person, what is going on with that other person. You thought

you were attending closely, but the blip shows that you have not been attending to the person

at all. You have failed to notice that she has changed her position. You (we) have been looking

without seeing. As Michaels writes, we are not invested in her personality even if we thought

we were. Her unknowability is heightened by the fact that in spite of all our attentiveness

we have not noticed that she has been slowly sinking. A thought experiment: how would it

change the effect if she had been slowly rising instead of sinking? In the piece we experience

MARGARET OLIN - RE: RESPONSE TO WALTER BENN MICHAELS

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the creation of a relationship and its failure at the same time. The relationship has been only

a visual one and visuality fails over and over.

The most striking visual image in Michaels’s brief essay, however, is not any of the stills from

Kydd’s non-still work but a graph of inequality of income in the United States by economists

Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, which he has repeated elsewhere in his writing. It tells a

clear story chronologically: a high percentage of inequality gets worse before it gives way to

better times, ending on an upswing where income inequality is at a peak even slightly higher

than it was at the worst moment early in story. This narrative is framed, as are the durational

photographs, but it cannot be called a durational graph. One sees the beginning and end; it

does not move; and it does not loop. But it does carry a sense of the continuation of the

image beyond the frame. The frame slices off a period before and after the narrative. We

may happen to know that the period before the beginning was a period of increasing income

inequality that constituted a long run-up to leading up to the horrific figure of 1917, where

the graph begins, and the still more horrific peak around 1930, 3 and while one would hope

that the lines beyond the border on the right will trace a downward path once more, there

is nothing that guarantees this. The only formal element of hope that the line will not rise

still further is the upper frame of the graph, which alas we know is arbitrary. The graph does,

however, urge us to leave it with a new view of the world and the determination to change

the situation, albeit without providing us with a way to do so.

Michaels brings the graph to bear on his readings of Kydd’s works by suggesting intriguingly

and convincingly that decreasing discrimination (tolerance for social, racial or ethnic

differences) can actually legitimate increasing exploitation, by masking it through a kind of

visual screen (because we no longer see difference as inferior, we leave aside actual inferiority).

Seeing without discrimination, from this point of view, though preferable to seeing with

discrimination, can act as just as much of a distraction from economic concerns. Kydd’s work,

if it reestablishes difference along with the autonomy of the work of art through the discourse

of framing, suggests that attention to our seeing might be an important way to grasp this

distinction.

But perhaps what Kydd’s work tells us is not that we need to see difference, but that we need

to see. Kydd’s videos show that we are not looking. I wonder whether this interpretation is

compatible with the insights offered by Walter Benn Michaels. While the graph tells us to

step back and look at the larger picture, Kydd seems to urge us nearer to the frame to direct

our attention to a single barely moving object or person, and to stay long enough to discover

its movements.

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I can’t make an inference about this because I have seen not any of the works by Owen

Kydd that Michaels discusses. Admittedly I have seen representations of some of them on

the internet and through the digital files that you, Charles, were kind enough to send me.

One could argue that as works of mechanical reproduction these are just as valid as the

screens hanging in the gallery. Yet I would have to argue that they are different precisely in

terms of Michaels’s interpretation of them as interrogators of a medium. The medium of my

MacBook Pro is not the same as that of the gallery with screens hung on the wall. It is a more

democratic one, perhaps, but also a more isolating one.

My computer screen differs in some important respects from a gallery wall: scale, height,

the relation to the viewer, and the presence of others. The gallery seems to be particularly

important to the artist. Early in his essay, Michaels writes that Kydd valued the screens

because (quoting Kydd), “the screens make it possible to depict motion without the

projection and the darkened room that turns even a gallery into a theatre.” The artist, then,

is concerned to maintain a gallery as a gallery and not as a theater. I wonder why. One might

think that the reason relates to Michael Fried’s well-known reservations about “theatricality,”

but Fried rarely relates such concerns to actual theaters, and theaters, not theatricality, are at

stake here. 4 In a gallery you are always aware of the whole space around you, while a theater

keeps you within the parameters of the screen, shutting out everything else. The fact that

you don’t see anything outside of the screen can be as important in a film as the fact of the

camera moving (if it moves) with the subject. If the frame is the whole world, with nothing

outside the frame that it shuts out, then there is no frame. 5 This is true even if the camera

does not move. Anyone in a fully lit gallery with a screen on the wall is aware of both the

frame and what is outside of it. The image acquires a quality of a picture this way. As Michaels

explains, this is “crucial if one takes seriously Kydd’s remark that ideally he’d like his videos

to be playing continuously all the time and thus to ‘have a presence on the wall like that of a

painting or photograph.’” Indeed such “presence” is exactly what Fried inveighed against in

his famed essay, “Art and Objecthood.” 6

This “presence” is crucial in many of the areas to which I might have pointed in making

my response. Michaels explicitly leaves aside some of these areas, and others as well, such

as the relation of the color photograph of Marina to the black and white image of the

plant. In the installation, the two are tied together by an electric umbilical cord that could,

considering the site where it attaches to the photograph of Marina, suggest a sort of birth

image. Michaels, having seen the work, can explicitly leave aside what emerges in this relation

to the other picture in the diptych as well as, in the image of Marina herself, the “relation

to the portrait—to the problematic of the pose and to the psychological ambitions of the

portrait.”

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Owen Kydd, Yukka Black and White and Marina, 2012. As seen on a MacBook Pro, 2014.

IdonothavethisprivilegebecauseIhaveseentheworksonlyonthesmallscreenthat,to

manyofus,isthewholeworld.Thesescreensinourofficesandhomesaremoreisolating

thaneventhewhitestofwhitewallsinthemostpristineofwhitecubes.Theyaremuchmore

theater-likethaneventhosesmallprojectspaceswhichresembletheaters—onesinwhich

patronsareconstantlywalkinginlateandleavingearly—whichKyddpresumablymeantto

rejectinfavorofplacinghisworksongallerywalls.Anincreasingnumberofartistswith

accesstotechnologyandagalleryhavemadeasimilarchoice.

MARGARET OLIN - RE: RESPONSE TO WALTER BENN MICHAELS

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Owen Kydd, Yukka Black and White and Marina, 2012. Installation view, UCLA.

But the experience of being seated at a computer in the intensity of isolation, with the pictures

close to the viewer and adjacent to each other could tempt one to leave aside the context.

Their adjacency could lead one to compare, rather than connect, Marina and the black and

white Yucca plant, while to give their movement a beginning and an end on Quicktime

instead of looping it goes counter to Kydd’s desire to see his durational photographs as

continual presences on walls in lighted rooms. Even more importantly, to look at these works

in isolation on a computer screen distracts from seeing a larger, more sweeping narrative such

as the one traced by the graph of income inequality, a narrative that might even encompass

the gallery system itself.

Much of what I say applies, albeit differently, to the intriguing durational photographs of

blowing bags and gently moving scraps of paper. They, too, seem to offer narrative moments

that make the “photographs” more film-like and pressure the viewer to wring a narrative

out of them. I hope, however, that I have explained well enough why I cannot contribute

a response, however tempting it is to engage in nonsite’s dialogical format of statement and

answer. After all, the only viewing experience more rewarding than to stand in front of a

screen in a gallery and to gaze intently at a work one on one, is to stand in front of the

work with another person who is gazing just as intently. Hopefully this experience will happen

many times in 2015 via the Vernon Collection at the Mellon-sponsored nonsite/LACMA

conference on photography.

Sincerely,

Margaret Olin

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N O T E SN O T E S

1. Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University

Press, 1992).

2. Charles, you mention a chapter, “‘It is Not Going to be Easy to Look into Their Eyes’: Privilege of Perception in Let us

Now Praise Famous Men,” in my Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012), 21-49. An early version of the

chapter was published in Art History 14 (1991): 92-115.

3. As summarized, for example, by Jordan Weissman, “U.S. Income Inequality: It’s Worse Today Than It Was in 1774,”

The Atlantic, September 19 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/us-income-inequality-its-worse-

today-than-it-was-in-1774/262537/[/ft]

[ft num=4] Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1980).

5. The theory of cinematic “suture” rests on this insight, probably earliest and most bluntly in Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinema

and Suture,” Screen 18 (1977/78): 35-47.

6. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P.

Dutton, 1968), 116-147.

Margaret Olin is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, with appointments at Yale Divinity School as well as in the

Department of Religious Studies, the Program in Judaic Studies and the Department of the History of Art. From 1986 until

her arrival at Yale in 2009 she was a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the departments of Art

History, Theory and Criticism, and Visual and Critical Studies. She is the author most recently of Touching Photographs

(University of Chicago, 2012). She is also co-editor, with Robert S. Nelson, of Monuments and Memory, Made and

Unmade (University of Chicago Press, 2003), and, with Steven Fine, Vivian B. Mann, and Maya Balakirsky-Katz co-edits the

journal Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. In 2012 she curated the multi-venue exhibition Shaping

Community: Poetics and Politics of the Eruv at Yale University, to which she contributed the photographic installations

“Urban Bricolage” and “No Carry Zone.”

nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated

with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668.

MARGARET OLIN - RE: RESPONSE TO WALTER BENN MICHAELS

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P H O T O G R A P H Y , A U T O M A T I S M ,P H O T O G R A P H Y , A U T O M A T I S M ,M E C H A N I C I T YM E C H A N I C I T Y

C H A R L E S P A L E R M OC H A R L E S P A L E R M O

Editor’s note: the debate between Diarmuid Costello and Charles Palermo on photography first began in

the Summer 2012 issue of Critical Inquiry and continues on their website under the heading Debating

Photography.

***

Since photography’s beginnings, descriptions of photography have emphasized its mechanical

character—the fact that it makes images without the kinds of human actions, such as

drawing, traditionally associated with image making. Philosophical objections to calling

photographs signs or representations continue to center on this feature of photography.

Increasingly, as photography has gained wider acceptance as a medium for artistic work,

the photographic image’s independence from certain kinds of action traditionally associated

with image making has come to seem less like a liability or source of doubt and more like

a source of artistic value for the medium. Either way, and without forgetting the variety

of work that can be accomplished with photographic materials and processes, we can speak

of pictures made photographically—images of the world made in cameras—as having been

made mechanically. In this sense, “mechanically” clearly means something like “with a

machine.”

Of course, cameras do not work purely mechanically. The operator always plays a role

in photography. Photographs require human agency. Further, agency has always been

understood to depend on the agent’s intention. That is, we generally exclude from discussions

of agency those acts performed (or events precipitated) unintentionally. If I leave a Polaroid

camera on a windowsill, and a breeze from the open window causes the curtain to billow, and

the billowing drapery knocks the camera to the floor, and the resulting jolt actuates the shutter

causing the camera to make a picture, we may call the result a photograph, but a generally

accepted account of agency will stop short of calling the making of the photograph an act.

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That is because the act I did perform—setting the camera on the windowsill—cannot be

understood (on the account I’ve given) as comprehending anything we could call my intention

to take a photograph. Much less this photograph, the one the Polaroid actually ejected after

the fall.

Of course, one might say that no one ever precisely intends to take this photograph, the one

that actually results from an instance of photographic activity. Indeed, there is a variety of

ways to say this. One might say, with Peter Henry Emerson:

The photographer at once sets up his machine, focuses and exposes; but in these

very processes his ideal has gone. What results may be beautiful, but it is no more

the representation of his ideal, the vision he first saw. It is something else, for the

machine imposes certain conditions which were never in the photographer’s mind

at all. 1

Or, one might put it as Lee Friedlander does:

I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I

got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry, and Beau Jack, the

dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and

78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium,

photography. 2

Whether you want to say photography captures too little of your ideal or so much that your

artistic vision is lost among the myriad objects it registers, it comes down to the same thing:

even if the beholder sees and understands precisely what you wanted her to, what she sees

is there because the machine records it, not because the photographer set out to show it

to her. These kinds of concerns find in photography’s mechanical element an openness to

vicissitudes, to accidents of production and reception, that competes with the photographer’s

intention. Certain photographers, like Edward Weston, commit to mastering or overcoming

the vicissitudes that attend the production of the photographic print. 3 Others, like Minor

White, envision the photographer’s task as mastering or overcoming the vicissitudes of

reception. 4

Roland Barthes’ famous distinction between the studium and the punctum theorizes, or displaces

from the realm of photographic practice to the domain of interpretive method, photography’s

openness to what the photographer did not intend. 5 Or, perhaps we should say, to what the

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53

photographer did not want specifically to show the beholder. I think it is important to open

up that distinction for a couple of reasons. First, it is a feature of Barthes’ reflections on

interpretation to claim that the openness of the object of interpretation to the consumer’s

creative activity, as against the will of the object’s creator, is historical—i.e., that it is in some

way a feature of the local conditions of the object’s production. In that sense, the author’s

agency may not be quite irrelevant to “punctums”—or to “texts.”

“Texts” are produced differently, because under different circumstances, from “works.” 6 So,

insofar as the openness of the photograph owes something to its production’s place in the

history of the transition from “work” to “text,” it seems reasonable to think it may be a

feature of the circumstances that inform its production and not or not merely because of the

mechanical mode of their production. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels are not “texts” because

typewriters are machines. Which is just another way of saying that it’s not saying much to say

that a thing is produced “mechanically.”

On the other hand, it is to say that the mechanical quality of the photographic-camera process

can secure a place for photography in a history of modern art written as a trajectory running

from “work” to “text.” But that could only be the case if photography’s mechanical quality

could be made to permit, under certain historical circumstances, a certain relation of the

photograph to the photographer’s agency, rather than merely describing the irrelevance of a

photographer’s agency to the photograph (as in the case of the Polaroid SX-70 thrown to the

floor by the billowing drapery).

The related concepts of automaticity and automatism come in precisely here. To say that

a process (mechanical or not) is automatic is to put it in relation to an agent’s intentions.

But it is also to say that what happens is a particular kind of action. I want to describe

this, in language borrowed from G.E.M. Anscombe’s account of agency, as a felt difference

between a description and an intention. 7 That is to say, when one performs an action

automatically, one intends to perform it, but the way one would describe one’s performance is

not by naming that action. So, for instance, when a hypnotic subject works out an arithmetic

problem she’s given in hypnotic trance—while distracted from her own arithmetical work

by a task, such as reciting lyrics—she is solving the problem automatically. By saying that, we

are saying that, although she would describe her action as reciting lyrics, she is intentionally

solving an arithmetic problem. If I take a photograph with a camera that focuses

automatically, I will describe the action as “taking a picture,” not as “focusing,” and yet, I

want the camera to bring the principal subject into focus. The automaticity depends on the

difference between the intended action I will give as a description and the action I intend

implicitly.

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This is not to say, however, that all implicit intentions should be called automatic. Only that

all automatic actions—where “automatic” is used in the relevant sense, in the sense we mean

when we speak of photography as automatic—are intended implicitly. When a doctor taps

my knee with a mallet, my leg automatically jumps. This is a different sense of the word

“automatic,” one that is more or less synonymous with “involuntary.” It does not help us

see how an act (photographing something) can be automatic, since my leg’s movement in that

example won’t count (in any usual account of agency) as an act. I don’t intend to do it, not

even implicitly or unconsciously. In that sense, it should be excluded for the same reason as

the photograph made by the accidentally fallen Polaroid camera. When I am hired to pump

poisoned water into a house in order to kill the inhabitants of the house, I may describe my act

as “polish[ing] that lot off,” but any number of other descriptions are available, any of which

might be described as corresponding to an intention of mine (pumping water, replenishing

the house’s water supply, supporting my family, making the world a better place) (Anscombe,

§23, pp. 37-41).

In an action we describe as automatic, there are similarly proliferating intentions around one

description (as there are in all or the vast majority of actions, I’m sure), but there is some

opacity in the connections among them—something unclear or surprising in their relations

to one another—so that, although we can acknowledge that they are ours and that we did

not perform them accidentally, we cannot specify in the way we could in the water-pumping

example, or we at least find surprising, how the accomplishment of some of them is related

to the accomplishment of others. When I say that my camera makes an image automatically,

I do not mean that it does it without me, or that I did not intend to make an image. What I

mean is that, I know that I performed an act under a description like “taking a picture.” And

I know that I pressed the shutter release deliberately, but I am registering the fact that there is

a gap or a disjunction between that description (“taking a picture”) and what I did (pointing

the camera and pressing the shutter release, in a pretty minimal scenario) in comparison with

other kinds of actions—say for instance, drawing—in which what I do (making and revising

marks) and my description of what I do (“drawing a picture”) seem intimately related or even

identical.

It is important to register the fact that the difference—between actions with the opacity that

leads us to speak of automaticity and those that don’t—is not in the technologies. There is

such a thing as automatic drawing, too. And there are instances of photography (perhaps

photograms would be among them) that do not tempt people to speak of automaticity or

of automatism. There are technologies that once seemed to embody automaticity that have

ceased to produce that structure, that difference between description and intention. Think of

automatic transmissions in automobiles, for example. Automaticity and automatism are thus

CHARLES PALERMO - PHOTOGRAPHY, AUTOMATISM, MECHANICITY

55

historical structures of expectation that shape relations between intentional actions and the

descriptions under which we perform them. It has been a defining and enduring feature of

photographic discourse up to now that automaticity and automatism have been available to

us through photography. An important task for the history of photography will be not just to

invoke photography’s automaticity, but to describe—for any photographic work or enterprise

it takes up—the nature and importance of its automaticity in that instance or set of instances.

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N O T E SN O T E S

1. Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, 3rd

. ed., rev. and enl. (New York: Scovill and Adams,

1899; reprint, with “The Death of Naturalistic Photography,” New York: Arno, 1973), bk. 1, 185.

2. David Company, “A Few Remarks on the Lens, the Shutter, and the Light-Sensitive Surface” in James Elkins, ed.,

Photography Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 311; citing Lee Friedlander in Lee Friedlander, ed. Peter Galassi

(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005).

3. Edward Weston, “Seeing Photographically” in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography, notes by Amy

Weinstein Meyers (New Haven, Conn.: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 172; originally published in The Complete

Photographer 9.49 (1943): 3200-3206.

4. Minor White, “Varieties of Responses to Photographs,” in Aperture Magazine Anthology—The Minor White Years,

1952-1976, ed. Peter C. Bunnell (New York: Aperture, 2012), 340; originally published in Aperture 10.3 (1962).

5. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday, 1981), 25-27 and

passim.

6. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V.

Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 73-81.

7. G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, second ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963).

Charles Palermo's two current research projects are an account of the importance of authority in the work of Pablo

Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire before cubism and inheritance as a metaphor for understanding in and around

photography, from Peter Henry Emerson to Douglas Gordon. His Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miro in the 1920s (2008) appeared in

Penn State University Press' Refiguring Modernism series. He has spoken and published on Cézanne, cubism, Michel Leiris,

Picasso, Apollinaire, Eugène Carrière, P.H. Emerson, Eugene and Aileen Smith, and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let

Us Now Praise Famous Men.

nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated

with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668.

CHARLES PALERMO - PHOTOGRAPHY, AUTOMATISM, MECHANICITY

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A C T I O N A N D A U T O M A T I S MA C T I O N A N D A U T O M A T I S M

D I A R M U I D C O S T E L L OD I A R M U I D C O S T E L L O

Editor’s note: the debate between Diarmuid Costello and Charles Palermo on photography first began in

the Summer 2012 issue of Critical Inquiry and continues on their website under the heading Debating

Photography.

***

I am going to abstract, here, from the ideas of “automatic” and “automaticity,” and from

“mechanism” and “mechanicity,” in order to focus on the following question: how should the

idea of “automatism” be understood, and what theoretical resources can be used to illuminate

it? This is what is at stake between Palermo and me. Palermo understands automatism as a

peculiar species of action. Whether it can be legitimately considered a kind of action at all

depends on how the notion of automatism itself is cashed out. Depending on that, I suggest,

the answer will be “yes,” “maybe,” or “no.”

1. Varieties of Automatism

In the original debate between us, on which this exchange draws, Palermo appeals to the

OED to show just how broad the meanings of “automatism” are when viewed in a broader

historical perspective than recent theory of photography allows. The historical evidence

Palermo adduces is compelling; it is whether it is also internally consistent that exercises

me. What all the varieties of automatism that Palermo canvasses have in common is that

they pick out acts that are not self-consciously thematized as such by the agent, yet which

are acts performed by that agent nonetheless. In his examples Palermo goes well beyond

the “two kinds of automatism” (habitual working methods on the one hand, and the free

associations of the unconscious that such methods are supposed to free up on the other) that

Rosalind Krauss employs to illuminate William Kentridge’s working procedures. It is Krauss

on Kentridge that is the original source of our debate: in defending Krauss’s bipartite account

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from some criticisms I raise in passing, Palermo introduces, without thematizing or perhaps

even being fully aware of the fact, a tripartite model of his own. 1 Schematically:

1. actions performed mechanically or unthinkingly, whether because habitual,

conventional or rendered “second nature” by training;

2. actions performed independently of conscious control, such as free association or

automatic writing;

3. actions unavailable to consciousness, because they take place at the level of motor or

neural processes that subtend reflective awareness.

For the sake of brevity I shall describe these here as “preconscious,” “unconscious” and

“unavailable to consciousness” respectively, though I decline the full theoretical burden that

these terms may entrain in this or that psychoanalytic theory of mind. So let me state that

by “preconscious” I mean any knowledge a subject possesses that is not presently conscious,

but that can be called to mind or consciously attended to by an act of will; by “unconscious”

I mean beliefs, attitudes or knowledge not presently conscious but in principle capable of

becoming conscious, though not necessarily through an act of will; and by “unavailable to

consciousness” I have in mind mental or bodily processes that are in principle incapable

of becoming conscious. Note, first, that there is a difference of kind rather than degree

between the first two and the third: that is, between sub-sentient processes that could not be

reflectively thematized, because they take place at a motor or neural level that subtends‚ and

so is inaccessible to, reflective awareness, and thoughts and activities that are merely no longer

or not yet thematized—whether because conventional, habitual or even repressed, though

they are in principle capable of being thematized. Call such (putative) “actions” strongly and

weakly automatic respectively. Claims about motor or neural processes that we could not

be aware of belong to the former; claims about what we are not (as things stand) aware of,

though we could in principle be brought to awareness of, belong to the latter. This is not

to deny that there is also a significant difference within the latter class between what I can

attend to through an act of will, and what may be unavailable volitionally: it is to maintain

that in so far as I could in principle become aware of such thoughts, beliefs or emotions,

this a difference of degree rather than kind. Though Palermo refrains from discussing what

I call strongly automatic actions here, in our original debate he endorses all three as bona fide

varieties of automatism, and seeks to ground them in Anscombe’s theory of action. So what,

one might think.

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2. Anscombe on Action; Palermo on Automatism

The problem is that, on Anscombe’s account, strongly automatic actions could not properly

be regarded as actions at all, because they fail her test of bona fide actions. As something we

could not know about, being below the level of possible reflective thematization, they are not

susceptible to the question ‘Why?’ in the relevant, reason giving sense that Anscombe has in

mind. 2 One cannot meaningfully ask someone why they are doing something they could have

no awareness of doing. On Anscombe’s account, for something to count as an act there must

be at least one description of that act such that, as so described, the agent can be intelligibly

asked for their reasons for doing it: the act, in Anscombe’s classic and influential formula,

must be “intentional under some description.” 3 This is compatible with the same act being

unintentional under a wide range of other descriptions. Thus the agent can be said to do many

things of which they have no awareness, in doing whatever it is that they are aware of doing.

A tennis player, for example, can be meaningfully asked why he tried a cross-court pass to his

opponent’s backhand side rather than a driving down the line, but not why he was creating

little eddies in the air or swatting midges, both of which may equally describe the bare act

of swinging his racket head, but neither of which are descriptions under which that act is

rationally endorsed by the agent. Or rather, one can ask this, but in so far as the agent is

likely to reply that they were unaware of doing either, the act will not count as intentional

under those descriptions. For just this reason agency cannot be reduced to intention. There

are many things agents do without knowing that they do them; nobody else created those

eddies or killed those midges. And they can be said to do those things, as opposed to those

things befalling them, because there is something that they do know they are doing which

involves the same act as those things that they do not know they are doing under various

other descriptions. So intention does not exhaust the space of agency.

So far so good: but does this create room for all the kinds of case that Palermo calls

“automatisms” and wants to construe as peculiar species of action? No. Take them in turn,

starting with Palermo’s “weakly” automatic examples: habit, convention and so on may be

straightforwardly accounted for in Anscombian terms. One may not reflectively attend to

formulaic social greetings, habitual actions such as turning door handles to leave familiar

rooms or reaching for tools that always occupy a given place on the tool board, or to the

individual movements of one’s fingers in playing a piano piece one knows well, but one can

be meaningfully asked them all the same. “Why did you greet him like that? “Why do you ask:

it’s the decent thing to do!” “Why did you extend your right hand in that way without looking

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up?” “I wanted the hammer.” “Why did you move your fingers like that? “I was trying—but

failing—to make that difficult transition.”

What about the harder to call intermediate cases, such as free association and other

unconsciously determined processes? Here I think the most honest answer that can be given is

“maybe.” In so far as a token belief, thought, emotion or action is unconscious now it will not

count as intentional under any description. Ex hypothesi, if the agent is unaware of holding

or doing it, they cannot be expected to say why they do. But saying that it would not count as

intentional (under such circumstances) is much weaker than saying that it could not count as

intentional. For it leaves open that whatever it is that the agent is doing or feeling could in

principle become conscious and then re-described in ways that Anscombe’s account would

capture. “I just can’t understand why you would say that!” “I didn’t want to acknowledge it

at the time, but I think I was angry about…” versus “I’m sorry, I don’t understand it either,

I just heard myself saying it.” Anscombe herself is noticeably equivocal about such cases,

and perhaps this slipperiness explains why. She recognizes that the question “Why?” asked of

something unfortunate blurted out in conversation is in order, but holds that the answer is

that there is no answer. 4 At this point, the psychoanalytically minded reader might want to

add: at least so long as the reasons remain unconscious. Be that as it may, this seems to be

an intermediate case: whether it will count as an action will depend on the circumstances of a

particular case, and these may change over time.

By contrast, it seems to me that Anscombe’s account, properly understood, is incompatible

with Palermo’s characterization of strongly automatic actions, and I now need to say why.

Central to Palermo’s attempt to enlist Anscombe’s theory of action to characterize a wide

variety automatisms as actions is the idea, reiterated here, of a “felt difference between a

description and an intention,” or a difference between an “explicitly” and an “implicitly”

intended action. The former would be any action that I can straightforwardly recognize as

intentional under the description I might give of my own action. The latter is something that,

if I understand Palermo correctly, I can somehow—Palermo declines to say how—acknowledge

as my intentional act, in the sense that I grant that it is neither an unintended consequences

of something that I did intend, nor an accident that befell me, but without being able to say

how it relates to what I straightforwardly or explicitly intended. This is all very murky, and I

believe that much of this murkiness has to do with the attempt to shoe horn the kind of cases

that Palermo is interested in (dissociation, hypnosis and the like) into a theoretical framework

that is clearly unsuited to their elaboration. On this theory such examples could not count as

actions, at least as so described.

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Such murkiness is only exacerbated when Palermo hones in on Anscombe’s account of the

difference between acts that are and acts that are not “swallowed up” by broader descriptions

that take into account a wider range of circumstances under which those acts, as narrowly

described, take place. To adapt Palermo’s example of trying to take a well-focused picture:

if I were to try to take a picture from the gently rolling deck of a ship at sea, then standing

still, holding the camera steady, trying not to unwittingly obscure the lens (etc) would all be

“swallowed up” by the description “trying to take a sharp picture of the rolling sea.” That

is, I could be asked why I was standing still or holding the camera steady and the answer

would be: because I am trying to get a sharp picture of the rolling swell. In so far as all of the

component acts are done in the service of the act as more broadly described, the narrower

descriptions will be “swallowed up” by that broader description. This means that all will count

as intentional under that broader description, irrespective of whether or not I reflectively

thematized any of them. None are unintended consequences or accidents. Whether or not I

need to thematize them may depend largely on whether I am an amateur or a professional:

think of how many things the experienced press photographer working at speed in dangerous

environments needs to have mastered as automatisms to avoid being immediately killed. All

such things, including being sensitive to what is about to explode into shot, will count as

intentional under the description, as Robert Capa might have put it, of “getting the shot.” If

this is what Palermo meant by “implicitly” as opposed to “explicitly” intended I would have

no problem with either his account or his appeal to Anscombe to underwrite it. In so far

as all such cases are intentional despite not being reflectively thematized, they fulfil Palermo’s

most compelling descriptions of automatisms and confirm the value of appealing to William

James’s account of habit as the progressive mastery of increasingly complex bodily acts (from

walking to fencing or playing piano) as a way of unpacking automatism. 5

The problem is that Palermo explicitly abjures this way of understanding an automatism,

despite the fact that it is the natural way to understand much of what he does say, and the fact

that his own examples of automatisms taking the form of high-level, well-drilled performance

would seem to require it. For what is “implicit” as he puts it in his earlier piece, is supposed

to characterize what is not “swallowed up” in this way by broader descriptions. This is an odd

understanding of “implicit:” it entails that if x is “implicit” in y, then x is at odds with y. I don’t

see how Palermo can have this both ways. Whatever is not swallowed up by a description is not

intentional under that description—implicitly or otherwise—yet automatisms are supposed to

count as implicitly intended under a description on Palermo’s account. The problem comes

out most clearly in the examples that Palermo elaborates at greater length in our previous

exchange. There Palermo maintains, consistent with his account here, that: “An automatic

action is not an accidental one; it is an intentional operation. […] We call an action automatic

if we acknowledge it as our act (as opposed, say, to an unintended consequence) but want to

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distinguish it from the description under which we perform that action” and, further, that “we

want to speak of an automatic act as automatic if we are tempted to note some disconnection

(or disconnections) between our intentions in performing it and the description under which

we act.” 6

The heart of our disagreement is this: if one wants to call an automatism an act—whether

explicitly or implicitly intended—and one wants to enlist Anscombe in support of this

account, then that automatism will have to count as intentional under the relevant description.

Palermo appears to grant this. What he refuses to grant is in fact an entailment of this: that

it will thereby be swallowed up by that description. On the theory of action that Palermo

appeals to, there just is no “disconnection” between intentional action and description to be

had. On the contrary, being “intentional under some description” is what makes a bodily

movement an action; something is an action only if it is intentional under some description.

Anything not swallowed up in this way does not contribute to the act in question; and if

it does contribute to the act, it will be swallowed up by the relevant description. This is an

either/or choice: if Palermo wants to maintain both that automatisms are actions and that

they can be captured by the machinery which Anscombe’s account offers, then he has to

accept the conceptual consequences of doing so. Failing that it looks like he will have to abjure

appealing to Anscombe to underwrite the account he favours.

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N O T E SN O T E S

1. Diarmuid Costello, “Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the

Photographically Dependent Arts,” in Critical Inquiry 38.4, special issue “Agency and Automatism: Photography as Art since

the Sixties,” Costello, Margaret Iversen and Joel Snyder, eds. (Summer 2012): 819-854; Rosalind Krauss, ‘“The Rock:”

William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,’ October 92 (Spring 2000): 3-35.

2. G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), §§ 5-7, 16-18.

3. Intention, §§23, 26 and passim.

4. Intention, §17.

5. “Habit” in William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950), 104-127; especially, 108, 112, and

114-117.

6. Charles Palermo, “Automatism,” Critical Inquiry (forthcoming, 2014).

Diarmuid Costello is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick and a previous Chair of the British

Society of Aesthetics. Between 2007-2011 he was Co-Director of the AHRC “Aesthetics after Photography” research

project and co-edited three journal issues on photography: “Photography after Conceptual Art” (Art History, 32.5, 2009),

“The Media of Photography” (The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 70:1, 2012) and “Agency and Automatism:

Photography as Art since the 1960s” (Critical Inquiry, 38.4, 2012). His articles on aesthetics in post-Kantian German

tradition and post-1960s art and theory have appeared in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The British Journal

of Aesthetics and Critical Inquiry among others. He is currently working on two books: On Photography and Aesthetics

after Modernism.

nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated

with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668.

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T H E T A N KT H E T A N K

NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #11: PHOTOGRAPHY AND PHILOSOPHY (WINTER 2013/2014) THE TANK

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J A M E S O N ’ SJ A M E S O N ’ S T H E A N T I N O M I E S O FT H E A N T I N O M I E S O FR E A L I S MR E A L I S M

G O R A N B L I X , D A N I E L L E F O L L E T T , F A B I O A K C E L R U D D U R Ã O , M A R N I N Y O U N G , D A N I E L L EG O R A N B L I X , D A N I E L L E F O L L E T T , F A B I O A K C E L R U D D U R Ã O , M A R N I N Y O U N G , D A N I E L L EC O R I A L E A N D K E V I N C H U AC O R I A L E A N D K E V I N C H U A

Fredric Jameson’s new book, The Antinomies of Realism (Verso, 2013), seemed tailor-made for

nonsite’s interests. Marxism and affect theory, contemporary politics and Realist aesthetics–a

set of problems at the center of our concerns. We invited a range of scholars and specialists

in art history, French literature, English literature, comp. lit. and Marxist aesthetics to engage

with Jameson’s book. Here you will find responses to Jameson by Goran Blix, Danielle

Follett, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, Marnin Young, Danielle Coriale, and Kevin Chua.

Editor’s note: for Jameson’s response to the tank, see Jameson Responds.

Goran Blix: Story, Affect, Style

It’s clear from Jameson’s latest book that a great deal remains to be said about the emergence

and dissolution of the classical realist novel. Concepts like Auerbach’s mimesis and Bakhtin’s

dialogism have hardly exhausted the problem, nor have more strictly historical accounts

seeking to situate this hybrid form along a spectrum of modes and genres running from

romance and epic to melodrama and modernism. Moreover, as Jameson recalls, discussions

of realism sadly tend to get bogged down in narrow-minded aesthetic partisanship—realism,

for or against?—as if the form could somehow intrinsically reinforce the dominant ideology

through its apparent reification of existing reality, or, on the contrary, necessarily point toward

the future by capturing the clashing forces working to undermine the status quo. Refreshingly,

Jameson here tries to steer clear of any normative assessment and seeks to understand realism

instead as a unique and fragile aesthetic constellation that flared up briefly within a larger

dialectical movement, which then also ended up dissolving the form.

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It would be impossible to do justice in this brief space to the subtlety of the dialectic Jameson

outlines. Suffice it to say that he grasps realism as the historically bounded outcome of

a diachronic tension between two overlapping forms: “story” (or telling) and “scene” (or

showing). Story is intended to capture an immemorial tradition of narrative that might include

novellas, ballads, and folktales, and which, at the deepest level, might find its roots in some

vaguely universal “narrative impulse.” Indeed, novels do tell stories, if nothing else, and

certainly inherit the narrative schemes of a vast and heterogeneous literary tradition. Scene,

on the other hand, would be a disruptive element that breaks the seamless continuity of the

story and introduces a heterogeneous “present” irreconcilable with the linear temporality in

which the events take place. Terms like description, ekphrasis, tableau, or Genette’s formal

pause (when narrated time stops) come to mind here, but I think that what Jameson has in

mind is a more abstract phenomenon, the emergence of an undetermined present floating

freely above the fateful sequence stringing the characters along their predestined paths; he

calls this moment an “impersonal present,” or a “present of consciousness,” and describes it

as a strange empty consciousness that would no longer retain the trappings of any empirical

personality, despite the presumed realization of this consciousness in the reader . The freedom

of this temporality might then redeem, or at least inflect somewhat, the oppressive impression

of fate and closure that haunts the social trajectories of the novel’s characters. What is

distinctive about realism, in fact, for Jameson, would be an unresolved tension between

pure story-time and this extraorbital present, which ceaselessly challenges the tale’s smooth,

narrative logic like an intrinsic Verfremdungseffekt.

I find this scenario very appealing; it gets at the hybridity of the realist novel and accounts for

the unstated clash between social prescription and utopian possibility that strains its internal

machinery. This dialectic also elegantly turns the origin of the realist novel—the disruptive

weight of “scene” bearing down on “story”—into the very force responsible for realism’s

eventual dissolution. Indeed, Jameson suggests that the gradual intensification of the “present

of consciousness,” as we move into the twentieth century, finally overpowers the narrative

impulse altogether, at which point plain old narrative would once more find its autonomy in

mass market fiction while an austere impersonal present would come to dominate the elite

sphere of modernist prose. Presented in outline, in this fashion, the story of the realist novel’s

birth and demise from a single cause would seem rather neat, perhaps too neat, on the whole,

and my own inclination is to regard all such meta-narratives skeptically, however much light

they shed—or especially when they shed plenty of light. Isn’t there something too teleological

about this productive clash of story and scene, which in the end simply reframes the classic

rise-and-fall narrative in dialectical terms, reducing literary evolution to an impersonal conflict

of metapoetic forces?

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However, Jameson’s dialectic is immensely useful on condition that we don’t mistake it

for a totalizing explanation and suppose that every novel from the last two centuries must

somehow be plotted along its curve. Not only does the sharp focus on Zola, Galdós,

James, and Eliot leave some far less pliable material out of the account (such as Hugo’s

and Huysman’s novels, which, while hardly “realist” in the strict sense, nonetheless occupy

an important place in the canon of nineteenth-century novels), but Jameson’s chronological

framework would itself require a great deal of explanation. Why does the formal impulse he

calls “scene” burst forth ex nihilo in the 1840s? And what would make it overpower the

narrative substrate in less than a century? The implicit answer, of course, would be history,

and the development of capitalism, but it’s not clear what precise logic connects economics

to formal aesthetic concerns, especially if one grants that the sphere of aesthetics achieves

partial autonomy in the course of the nineteenth century. Jameson points suggestively to

the centrality of “affect” in this development and argues compellingly that the driving

force behind the scenic disruption of narrative (the emergence of an impersonal present)

is the text’s historically novel inscription of affect. And affect, as theorized here, would be

something like an unnamed emotional state that discourse has not yet captured and reified

within a grid of socially recognized passions. The most innovative writers would somehow

have been attuned to these uncanny and nameless affects, hence “the new affective styles

invented by Flaubert and Baudelaire” in response to the “historic emergence of the bourgeois

body” (42). The rise of the body’s unruly and amorphous affects in the well-policed edifice of

narrative, then, seems to be the overarching story Jameson tells here.

Let me say again that this clash between affect and narrative continuum is an extremely

fruitful idea, and Jameson puts it to ingenious use here to diagnose a set of symptoms in

the evolving realist novel: what he calls the “codification of affect,” for instance, in Zola’s

novels, in which the overabundant sensory onslaught of Paris would seem to overwhelm the

organizing power of language; or the fading into the background of the lead characters who

used to carry the story-line in Galdós and Tolstoy, in favor of minor, episodic characters,

alien to the narrative logic; or the triumph of point of view and the style indirect libre in James

and Flaubert, who each, in their own way, undo the signifying monopoly of the omniscient

narrator, opening the texture of their works to the play of affect. A very suggestive treatment

of Eliot highlights the progressive liquidation of melodrama within realism, showing how

the moral category of evil on which melodrama depends loses its pertinence within the

aesthetic regime of affect; since affect is an internal state, and not a judgment imposed from

without, it technically knows no evil; it is possible to act in bad faith, Jameson argues, but

phenomenologically it would be impossible to feel oneself to be evil.

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The downside of this dialectic, however, as an explanatory force for realism, is that its chief

terms, story and affect, are so broad that their presence could no doubt be detected anywhere.

With what justification can one claim that the “bourgeois body” emerged historically in

the 1840s? Or that this body, however defined, would somehow be a precondition for the

emergence of affect? And if affect is instead taken to be a universal phenomenon, which the

realists simply tuned into for the first time, why did this happen just then? It would seem

more plausible to me to say that affect—if defined as emotion that exceeds any historically

given taxonomy of passions—has always existed, and that its shadow presence could be

discerned in texts throughout history. There are other problems with the role affect plays in

this argument as well: for one, why should new and unnamed passions, like ennui, spleen,

and so forth (which the period after all does baptize), prove more disruptive to narrative

order than the long list of discursively codified passions? Or inversely, how does the ability

to name a passion, Phèdre’s fury, for instance, or Achilles’ wrath, automatically immunize the

textual order against its potential ravages? Naming isn’t a guarantee of order; and classified

passions don’t necessarily become obedient subjects. Finally, affect, if it does indeed disrupt

narrative logic, is not in any obvious way connected to the impersonal consciousness that

Jameson has situated above the plane of narrative destiny. How does affect give rise to this

consciousness? Are they in fact coterminous, phenomenologically speaking? And if so, how

does an unnamable physical sensation give rise to an impersonal form of awareness? The idea

of an “impersonal consciousness” is both intriguing and promising, but I would have liked to

see it fleshed out in greater detail.

As for the other term in this dyad, story, similar questions could be asked. Was earlier

narrative fiction always so narrowly narrative, so impervious to interruption, Verfremdung,

and shattered temporalities? What about Jacques le fataliste? And is it fair to claim that the

famous closure of classical narrative—the texte lisible that Barthes once opposed to the more

modern, open texte scriptible—always has such unambiguously oppressive effects? Jameson

resorts here to Sartre’s well-known critique in La Nausée of the unstated teleology that governs

the classical novel, which, from its opening pages, surreptitiously presupposes its end, and

thus teases the reader with a mystifying illusion of freedom. Two things should be said here:

first, that the alleged closure of form—whether it takes a generic form, as in tragedy or

comedy, or is produced in some other fashion through plot, ideology, or metaphysics—often

leaves great internal room for the play of contingency, and that even the most brutally

vectorized text could be radically undermined by countless internal counterforces. Second,

it’s by no means self-evident that the destiny Jameson identifies in the “past-present-future”

form of narrative inevitably reinforces society’s dominant ideology. It can, and does, no

doubt, often do just that, but can we really say that the narrative weave of past-present-

future is intrinsically conservative? It can be a way to make sense of existence in time, to

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impose meaning retrospectively, to propose model trajectories, and to account historically for

a current state of the world, etc. But the chief function of narrative in all such cases is to make

sense, not necessarily to justify, reify, and impose; to understand isn’t inevitably to pardon;

and description isn’t always prescription. Moreover, the causal chains plotted chronologically

by narrative are not always forged by necessity, no more so, I would argue, than the writing

of history is inevitably a theological discipline: to say what happened, and how and why, isn’t

to say that it had to happen, at least outside of lab conditions. If this seems obvious for realist

narrative, in which chance plays such a preponderant role, the same could probably be argued

for almost any narrative universe, perhaps even for tragedy.

With these caveats in mind, let me return to affect, and suggest that to Jameson’s list of

narratological and structural mutations provoked by affect, one might add a crucial and rather

obvious element which quite possibly registers the subterranean impact of affect more finely

than any of them: style. Style is obviously not Jameson’s primary concern here, and it is true

that it lends itself poorly to the dialectical and metapoetic process he has outlined; it is also

true that, as Buffon had it, style has been taken to convey the individual’s signature (le style,

c’est l’homme) and could thus in theory be dismissed as the very antithesis of the impersonal

consciousness that affect is said to have ushered into modern literature. And yet style, it strikes

me (as I look at everything Jameson is able to do with affect) has perhaps been misread too

quickly as the much-sought-after personal stamp that the period’s writers longed to imprint

on the language. What if style were instead, unwittingly and ironically, the very trace of an

impersonal affect? Could style possibly be read as the delicate seismic chart of a period’s

unnamed tremors, as these become diffracted through the writer’s sensations, impressions,

and internal soundscapes? Style would still be signature, but only adventitiously, insofar as

each recording device differs superficially, but in its deepest stratum the cadences, rhythms,

and phonic patterns of style might be thought to offer a shadowy sonogram of the period’s

affective landscape. It would in that case be possible to imagine a form of stylistics that had

nothing to do with the cult of the author, but which, on the contrary, sought to map the

inaudible collective soundscape of affect and in so doing to offer a glimpse at the nameless

forces still tunneling towards the future.

Danielle Follett: Is the Cheese Meaningless? The Distension of Dialectics in

Jameson’s The Antinomies of RealismThe Antinomies of Realism

It is strange to see Jameson jumping on the affect theory bandwagon in his recent book, The

Antinomies of Realism, in which he offers a wide-ranging discussion of realism, defined as a

dialectic between storytelling and affect. Although these poles are considered to be “the two

chronological end points of realism” (10), they are said to operate simultaneously within the

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text itself and it seems that they should not be confused with the activity of the writer and that

of the reader. Rather, they are respectively aligned with récit vs description, telling vs showing,

linear time vs the perpetual present, destiny vs existential being, determinism vs contingency,

closed vs open forms, arias vs chromaticism, meaning vs meaninglessness (“unassimilable to

meaning” [37]), and named things vs namelessness and a general “resistance to language”

(31). And, leading the list, as the general binary under which these rather classical Western

antinomies are subsumed, is the polarity of named emotion vs affect. Jameson states that he

follows Rei Terada in differentiating emotions from affects in that the former are defined as

conscious states and the latter as bodily sensations; “language is here opposed to the body”

(32). 1 The role of language and meaning in these various binaries may thus help explain the

recourse to the central antinomy of emotion vs affect as a theoretical vehicle in the discussion

of realism, as this pair seems to parallel the linguistic/anti-linguistic schema set out in some

of the other binaries.

The idea of a resistance to language, common to one pole of each of these binaries, may

help explain the presence of affect in this theory of realism, but does not seem to justify it.

In this reduction of a wide series of literary/philosophical elements to a polarity of emotion

vs affect, we witness the danger of a distended dialectics, an expansion and proliferation

of dualisms, a slippage between various somewhat similar oppositions which are then lined

up under the heading of a rather arbitrary antinomy. For what seems at times to get lost

in this theorization is realism itself, or the specificity of realism. It is perhaps true, even

convincing, that realism exists as an aesthetic product at the crossroads of telling and showing,

plot and description, destiny and existence, causality and contingent singularities. But does

“affect” really summarize the latter terms of each of these dualities? In this theorization, affect

seems to function as a placeholder for all possible terms on the existential/phenomenological

side of the equation. Even more oddly, the determinist/linguistic side reduces to named

emotion, although this element is mentioned less often. As a placeholder, the concept of

affect necessarily lacks precision. The notion of affect is far from being synonymous with

namelessness, which has taken many aesthetic forms throughout history (and well before

the mid nineteenth century, such as in the theory of the sublime), and it is unclear why

the appeal to affect here is warranted. Similarly, one need not have recourse to the idea

of affect to appreciate synesthesia and the importance of the senses, and especially that

of smell, in mid to late nineteenth-century literature, including but not limited to realist

literature (“Odor…seems everywhere, from Baudelaire to Proust, to be a privileged vehicle

for isolating affect and identifying it for a variety of dynamics…” [35]), and it is unclear what

this concept brings to the discussion of smell. If affects are defined as “bodily feelings” (32),

smell certainly may be seen to fall into that category, but this categorization, in the context

of this discussion, does not bring us closer to understanding the olfactory experience and its

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role in aesthetics. Nor is the concept of affect necessary or especially helpful when focusing

upon the eternal present, existence, intensity, singularity, experience or contingency (36-37),

all recurrent concepts in nineteenth and twentieth-century aesthetics, which lose some of their

specificity and force when lumped under the (rather arbitrary) heading of affect. One of the

book’s longer examples of the functioning of affect revolves around music and especially

Wagner’s chromaticism (38-41)—which is, let it be said in passing, an aesthetic form quite far

from realism; chromaticism, like affect, waxes and wanes in intensity and nuance, and “would

seem the most essential, but also the most obvious, way of characterizing everything that is

proteiform, metamorphic, shimmering and changeable-ephemeral about affect itself…” (40).

These are fine descriptions of Wagner’s music in itself, but the concept of affect neither helps

explain chromaticism nor is explained by it. Affect as a theoretical vehicle in the discussion

of realism seems to lack specific explanatory force; it may thus be helpful here to apply the

principle of Ockham’s razor.

Jameson’s thesis is also historical: around the 1840s, affect began to emerge in creative

production, entering as a force of liberation from récit and the determinism of named

emotions. He describes the “multiplicity of ways this new element can pervade nineteenth-

century realism and open up its narratives” (35). Henceforth, affect and narrative will

intermingle in a tense dialectic, giving rise to realism. Before this time, emotions and

sensations, and other described details, function in literature as signs: “In Balzac everything

that looks like a physical sensation—a musty smell, a rancid taste, a greasy fabric—always

means something, it is a sign or allegory of the moral or social status of a given character…”

(33). As an example, Jameson cites the description of the “stuffy, mouldy, rancid” smell of

the Vauquier salon in the beginning of Le père Goriot, which “is not really a sensation, it is

already a meaning, an allegory” (33), a sign referring to the qualities of the people who inhabit

the salon. On the other hand, like the descriptive details evoked in Barthes’ “L’Effet de réel,”

affects have no signifying value, no narrative function, and “cannot be present in the regime

of the récit” (35). Jameson refuses Barthes’ reincorporation of such literary “non-meaningful,

non-symbolic objects” into the realm of signification and semiotics by making them signs

of realism itself, and thus maintains a strict duality between allegory and the body, between

meaning and affect. In this context, “affect” is a rather weighty word with a certain baggage,

making it unwieldy when used to refer to a variation of the reality effect, for many descriptive

details have little to do with the “bodily feelings” which are said to define affect. Again, smells

may be said to approach such feelings, but it is difficult to see how for example the barometer

in the Aubain house in “Un coeur simple,” cited by Barthes at the beginning of his famous

essay as a primary example of a narratively insignificant detail, should be considered a bodily

feeling. 2 Perhaps the apparently meaningless presence of such an object is related to raw,

contingent existence which in turn evokes the phenomenological experience of existence, an

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experience which is necessarily embodied and therefore, by a series of slippages, brings us to

bodily feelings. But this logic is quite slippery and the raison d’être of affect in the argument is

unclear as it does not help us to grasp the particularity of the realistic detail.

Beyond the question of the terminology of affect, however, the historical argument is

somewhat overstated, for it posits an opposition where in many ways there should be

seen a continuity and an evolution. Against Balzac’s overdetermined, allegorical details,

Jameson contrasts Baudelaire’s, Flaubert’s and Zola’s indeterminable objects, “unassimilable

to meaning.” After discussing the mustiness of the Vauquier salon and its signposting of the

moral and social qualities of the characters, Jameson turns to Baudelaire’s mustiness:

Dans une maison déserte quelque armoire

Pleine de l’âcre odeur des temps, poudreuse et noire…

(“Le Flacon”)

As the first literary example given of “this new element” (35), this passage deserves some

attention. Jameson states that “the musty smell of time drifts in indeterminable synesthesia

across the grimy tactility of the armoire. These unnamable sensations have become

autonomous […] they no longer mean anything: states of the world, they simply exist” (34).

When taken out of context, things can indeed seem like autonomous singularities; but nothing

in “Le Flacon” justifies this interpretation of the autonomy of sensation. To show this it is

necessary to put Baudelaire’s mustiness back in its context:

Il est de forts parfums pour qui toute matière

Est poreuse. On dirait qu’ils pénètrent le verre.

En ouvrant un coffret venu de l’Orient

Dont la serrure grince et rechigne en criant,

Ou dans une maison déserte quelque armoire

Pleine de l’âcre odeur des temps, poudreuse et noire,

Parfois on trouve un vieux flacon qui se souvient,

D’où jaillit toute vive une âme qui revient.

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(lines 1-8)

Through metonymy, the mustiness of the armoire is linked to the perfumes that penetrate

glass and to the memory/soul contained within the old flask. The armoire is related to the

Oriental chest and the flask; in each case, a container is opened and a smell or a memory

is released. Just as the soul is held within the flask, the flask is held within the armoire or

the chest. The poem goes on to evoke the thoughts/memories/vertiginous feelings which

escape, fly and disturb the subject, as rotting Lazarus and a rancid love awaken from the

grave; thus, after the poet’s own death, he (and presumably his poems) will be like an old

discarded flask, containing memory/perfume/poison. The mustiness of the armoire is thus

not autonomous; it participates in a complex metonymic web of smells and memories. Nor

is this smell especially nameless: although “âcre,” “poudreuse et noire” are imprecise, just as

are the other epithets attached to the odors and memories in the poem, these words and the

poem itself constitute an attempt at naming a complex psychological reality.

As for the claim that these sensations “no longer mean anything,” it simply does not do

justice to the poem. It may be difficult to pinpoint what exactly the sensations mean,

but they are not meaningless, autonomous singularities. Far from creating a rupture with

signifying, Baudelaire’s objects and sensations are used to bring forth new means of signifying

through metonymic and synesthetic correspondences. Baudelaire would quite disagree with

the statement, “it is allegory and the body which repel one another and fail to mix” (37),

for Baudelaire himself conceived of his poetic method as a continuation of the long poetic

tradition of allegory and long spiritual tradition of correspondances, modernized and applied

to the romantic embodied subject. 3 Baudelaire did not clearly distinguish between allegory,

symbol, analogy, and correspondence; what is certain is that his sensations are not singularities

but participate in such signifying dualities, or rather metonymic chains. A citation from Les

Paradis artificiels (1860) suffices to show that Baudelaire’s relationship with allegory is strong

and complex:

Nous noterons en passant que l’allégorie, ce genre si spirituel, que les peintres maladroits

nous ont accoutumés à mépriser, mais qui est vraiment l’une des formes primitives et les

plus naturelles de la poésie, reprend sa domination légitime dans l’intelligence illuminée par

l’ivresse. 4

Here, allegory and the body are explicitly joined in drunkenness, ivresse. Baudelaire seeks

significant relations between the sensory and the intangible, attempts to portray the ideal

within the real, and his poetics of correspondances may thus be seen as an evolution out of, and

not a break from, Balzac’s more direct and societal allegorizing. Baudelaire’s allegorizing can

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even at times be more classical than Balzac’s, such as in “Le Cygne.” Baudelaire was a great

reader of Balzac, and Balzac himself mentions synesthesia several times. One cannot separate

allegory and synesthesia, or allegory and the body, in Baudelaire, for their mixture produces

his poetics of correspondances. 5

Thus there is more continuity than rupture between Balzac and Baudelaire. But there are

differences, of course, and Jameson is correct in identifying the appearance of something

new in the mid nineteenth century, toward the beginning of modernism, something which

he unhappily terms affect. Baudelaire modernizes the tradition of allegory; this is here

understood in the sense in which he defines modernity (“La modernité, c’est le fugitif,

le transitoire, le contingent…”). 6 Among the list of terms Jameson associates with

affect—namelessness, meaninglessness, synesthesia, eternal present, existence, intensity,

singularity, experience, contingency—the last of these seem in our opinion most to describe

“this new element.” Here the risks of proliferating dialectics and the collapsing of non-

synonymous terms become clear: while singularity and meaninglessness are not operative as

new elements, as we have seen, contingency is. Indeed, to generalize, post-1850 aesthetics,

both realist and symbolist, may be understood partly as the fusion of contingency and

meaning, resulting in an abundance, perhaps an overabundance, of contiguous signifiers

and related non-necessary signs, stretching older aesthetic forms toward abstraction. This is

true of Wagner’s chomaticism, impressionist dabs of paint, symbolist synesthesia and realist

description. The story of these developments can be told without recourse to the notion of

affect, which needless to say should not be confused with contingency.

This brings us back to Jameson and realism. Jameson continues to insist upon the idea of

meaninglessness in Zola’s abundant descriptive lists; in referring to the copious description

of the cheeses in the shop in Le Ventre de Paris, he speaks of “their veritable liberation from

meaning in all their excess” (62). The pungent cheese passage indeed shows a “delirious

multiplicity” (62), but the cheeses are far from being meaningless or “autonomous” (59). For

what does it mean when it is said that an element of a literary work is meaningless? Can it

be true that multiplicity or excess leads to meaninglessness? Or that the moment something

exists in the bodily realm, it does not signify? These are quite strong claims which would imply

a very limited conception of meaning as belonging only to something non-embodied which

exists in a reasonable quantity. We should rather take a more supple view of meaning, in the

optimistic theoretical perspective that there is no element of a text that is “meaningless,” by

the very virtue of it existing in a composed and authored text. Again, we may not be able to

ascertain the meaning(s) definitively or simply, but nothing justifies the pessimistic view, and

it is our job as textual analysts humbly to make the attempt and not flee the task by invoking

a postmodern celebration of delirious meaninglessness.

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Here, saying that the cheeses are liberated from meaning seems to say that Zola’s objects do

not signify in the same determinate way as Balzac’s. But not signifying like Balzac’s objects

is different from not signifying altogether. As we have seen with Baudelaire, proliferation of

variation, invitation to contingency, abundance of contiguous and non-necessary signifiers,

hyperbole of sensation, are part of modern aesthetics, here taking the form of realist

description. They may function here as a commentary or reflection on the role of facts and

lists in a newly statistical age, or on the newly expanding commodification of produits de terroir

provoking a loss of particular provincial origins and a nausea of oversaturation. The list of

cheeses may also serve a structural function in the context of the novel, creating a moment of

suspense as the interruption in the gossip between the shopkeepers is prolonged excessively.

Certainly the many metaphors within the passage, especially those relating to rot, sickness

and wounds, bring it a richly layered symbolism; and above all, the framing of the list of

stinking cheeses within a conversation about stinking moral judgments upon the stinking acts

of others carries an allegorical meaning that is not very far afield from Balzac’s use of clearly

determined objects to depict character traits. Jameson clearly recognizes and amply describes

this allegorical element but he seems frustrated to see Zola add “quite unnecessarily” that it

seemed as though it was the conversation which smelled so awful (64). Necessary or not, this

addition exists in the text and conveys a part of the meaning of the passage; this seems to

be frustrating to Jameson as he describes the “semi-autonomous symphony” of the cheeses,

which “assert their individuality” (63), as though they were liberating themselves from plot

and thus from meaning. But copious presentation, excessive multiplicity of description in

itself, does not translate into “autonomy” from the other elements of a text, especially

when the interdependence between textual elements is emphasized by the author in such an

interpretive commentary. This addition seems to highlight the similarity and not the rupture

with Balzac’s methods of creating meaning (the allegorical factor would not be difficult to

accept if the multiplicity of the long descriptive passage were replaced by a simple “le fromage

puait”). This is where Jameson writes: “But what is also crucial here is not so much the

allegorical function of the cheeses as their veritable liberation from meaning in all their excess,

so that they come to know their own temporality, in which even the silences of the body

play their role” (64). It is strange to see Jameson admit an allegorical function of the cheeses

and still assert that they are liberated from meaning (we will not attempt to understand how

cheese can know its own temporality or which body is intended here). In brief, it is difficult

to ground the claim that the cheese is meaningless.

The issue of meaningless elements, so central to Jameson’s argument about post-1850

aesthetics, makes one wonder what really is at stake here, if there is a hidden interest in

such “autonomy” from signifying structures. Jameson writes, “the literary representation of

affect… has as its function to replace the opposition of mind and body” (73); but it is a

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common contradiction in postmodern thinking to defend a monism of mind and body, while

simultaneously banishing the mind (alongside meaning) and so focusing on the body that

the dualism necessarily returns. 7 Jameson has formulations like “[these elements] must not

be allowed to become symbolic…” (65). What does the “autonomous unfolding of sense

data” (59) really mean? It is assumed that the sensations are autonomous from meaning;

but again, there is no foundation for the claim that any element of a text is meaningless.

It would be impossible to analyze in this short space the reasons for the postmodern fear

of mind and meaning, but one may say that Jameson’s concept of affect comes down to

another variation on the postmodern “unassimilable,” another trace, another inexpressible,

another other, what Lyotard called “l’inaccordable” and others have called by a host of other

names. 8 This is a late romantic position, critical of reason, mind and language as it is feared

that they will dissect/murder, reduce or reify, a perspective that seeks a return to nature in the

form of namelessness, pure existence and the “perpetual present”—showing well that we are

(unfortunately) still in the romantic age.

1. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge: Harvard, 2001).

2. Roland Barthes “L’Effet de réel,” Communications 11:11 (1968), 84.

3. See Patrick Labarthe, Baudelaire et la tradition de l’allégorie (Geneva: Droz, 1999). Notice the direct reference in “Le Flacon”

to the possibly contemporaneous sonnet, “Correspondances,” Baudelaire’s synesthetic ars poetica, whose third stanza begins:

“Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants….”

4. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 1:430.

5. When Jameson claims later on that in Flaubert, “Balzacian allegory [transformed] into the bodily contingency of affect,”

he is closer to the truth, although the notion of affect continues to confuse more than aid.

6. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 2:695.

7. A truly monist view, such as a Buddhist view based in the experience of meditation, would disagree with the following:

the “‘perpetual present’ is better characterized as a ‘reduction to the body,’ inasmuch as the body is all that remains in any

tendential reduction of experience to the present as such” (28).

8. Jean-François Lyotard, L’Inhumain: Causeries sur le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 12.

Fabien Akcelrud Durão

Reading Fredric Jameson is a singular experience. Very few critics have managed to create

a kind of writing that carries their signature in almost every sentence, and Jameson’s is

unmistakable. Many commentators have noted the breath-taking character of his textual

universe, the broad scope of his references; indeed, it is hard to find another thinker who

is able to combine an Auerbach-like erudition, an utter familiarity with the Western literary

tradition as a whole, with an openness to mass-produced cultural artifacts, the blockbuster,

the science fiction novel or TV series. Unlike the old philologists, however, familiarity

with such an immense textual body does not translate into mere explication or comparison

of works; on the contrary, one of the most exciting aspects of Jameson’s criticism is its

inventiveness, the way it manages to propose original ideas and counter-intuitive theses. To

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all that one should add Jameson’s greatest merit, namely his willingness to engage theories

from other, often antagonistic, camps without surrendering his political and philosophical

position. This is no small feat, especially when viewed from a place like Brazil (where I live)

where intellectual fields seldom interact – our Anti-Oedipus, for instance, is de-marxized, our

Freud or Lacan rarely brought to bear on society, our Marxism largely endogenous and self-

feeding. 1 More than an interpretative strategy, metacommentary is a form of comportment.

It is with all this in mind that one can say, paraphrasing Hal Foster, that this book is vintage

Jameson. Here we find the enormous scope of references, the desire for totality, and the

creative, thought-provoking propositions, but now confronted to a different, if not wholly

new object (chapters 3, 4 and 5 of The Political Unconscious already dealt with Balzac, Gissing

and Conrad). After his pathbreaking volume on postmodernism and the twin volumes on

modernity and modernism, 2 a text on realism seemed almost a logical necessity. But more

than just a new book, this monograph is a propitious place to reflect on the mixture of

achievements and problems of Jameson’s writing, which I believe is symptomatic of the

North-American intellectual milieu today. 3

The Antinomies of Realism has a clear underlying dialectic hypothesis. It confines realism to the

novel and proposes to grasp it “as a historical and even evolutionary process in which the

negative and the positive are inextricably combined, and whose emergence and development

at one and the same time constitute its own inevitable undoing, its own decay and dissolution”

(6); in this sense, then, “what brings a phenomenon into being also gradually undermines and

destroys it” (7). The poles of this opposition will be, on the one hand, a narrative impulse

of story telling, the concatenation of events on a temporal continuum that organizes past,

present and future, and, on the other, the withdrawal from temporality as such by means

of affect. Realism would thus emerge from the tale through an investment in affect, which

in turn would corrode it from the inside in modernism and later on in postmodernism,

conceived as the apotheosis of affect, the death of narrativity and the waning of any sense of

temporality. It is interesting to note how this innovative idea deviates from a more traditional

(perhaps old-fashioned?) understanding of realism espoused by some Marxist critics, who

defined the concept according to its potential to reveal social truth. Following this view,

Kafka’s nightmarish works, for example, would describe the truth of an insane and inhuman

society, something that would not be possible to achieve within a narrow idea of realism.

More than the style of a period or a genre, realism would then be something like a function

of veracity. 4 One could here ask if Jameson would not be losing in social diagnosis what he

gains in terminological accuracy, in a well-delineated construction of the object, for in this

framework the link to society has to be drawn, not from the formal aspects of individual

works in relation to specific class configurations, 5 but from the politics of affect in its

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historical unfolding. Rather than a weakness this may indicative of the vantage point from

which Jameson deals with his corpus, for the horizon within which he moves is the broadest

one and encompasses a long history of forms. And yet, he rejects the kind of quantitative

analysis undertook by Franco Moretti, who approaches the novel from above, relying on

maps and statistics; Jameson’s option for close reading is thus both exciting, because it shows

the presence of his arguments in the minutiae of texts, and strained, because it demands from

the reader that he fills in the gap between the individual case and the immense universe the

particular work is aimed at explaining. This is particularly troubling when too much stress is

laid on single works, as in the case of Alexander Kluge’s Chronik der Gefühle, which exhibits the

logically central category of a “realism without affect” (187), but “has no parallels elsewhere

in the world and is scarcely a paradigm for some generalized theory of the return of narrative

or storytelling” (188). In sum, one may feel a lingering suspicion that the vast horizon of

inquiry is not reconciled with the exemplarity of single works, and that as the former recedes

in particular analyses, what remains is mostly praise for the latter.

The book is divided into two main parts, with no concluding remarks. The first one is

titled “The Antinomies of realism” and has nine chapters. The first of them works out the

opposition already mentioned of récit and roman, the tale and the novel. The privileged example

of the former is the ninth tale of the fifth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron. It is the “purest form

of récit” (but how can one be sure of that?), a tale “that needs no ‘showing’, no scene, no

present of narrative at all […] The anecdote not only needs no dialogue and no point of view

[…]. [T]he tale cannot exist in the present, its events must already have happened” (24). The

novel will emerge as the insertion of the now in the tale, of both liberty and destiny. It is

in the second chapter that the concept of affect in introduced, for the perpetual present of

postmodernism “is better characterized as a ‘reduction to the body’, inasmuch as the body is

all the remains in any tendential reduction of experience to the present as such” (28). Affect

is distinguished from “named emotions”, or the passions (anger, sadness, joy etc.) of ancient

rhetoric. This is an important and in itself ambiguous part of the book, for the association

of “the rise of affect with the emergence of the phenomenological body in language” (32) is

a brilliant insight, whereas the way the opposition between emotion and affect seems not to

be handled dialectically enough. The latter is dealt with as inherently superior to the former,

which is seen as too limited and restricted; in the classic rhetorical tradition, however, the

passions were far from stable entities, for not only were their boundaries blurred, but they

were also liable to be manipulated by the writer/orator to achieve specific aims.

Chapters 3 to 6 deal with particular authors. Zola’s work is characterized as the first – as

opposed to Balzac’s – in which affect enjoys a new level of autonomy: “What look like the

unique individual destinies of so many récits are in fact now transformed into the abstract

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fever-chart of affects and intensities rising and falling; and Zola’s narratives are what happen

to individuals and their destinies when their récits fall into the force-field of affect and submit

to its dynamic, in a situation in which the two forces [i.e. named emotions and affect – FAD],

the two temporalities [past-present-future vs. atemporal present of affect], are still for one last

moment more or less equal in their power and influence.” (76) In Tolstoy Jameson identifies

this tension in the opposition between scene and plot, “the chronological continuum and the

eternal affective present which, realized in quite distinct ratios in the various great realists,

nonetheless marks out the space in which realism emerges and subsists, until one of the two

antithetical forces finally outweighs the other and assures its disintegration.” (83) The scenes,

however, are made possible by an expansion and deployment of affects in singular characters,

while the multiplicity of characters enables the unfolding of the plot. Chapter 5 reads the

Spanish novelist Pérez Galdós in order to claim that in him one witnesses “a deterioration

of protagonicity, a movement of the putative heroes and heroines to the background, whose

foreground is increasingly occupied by minor or secondary characters whose stories (and

‘destinies’) might once have been digressions but now colonize and appropriate the novel for

themselves.” (96) The pages devoted to George Eliot are among the most daring in Jameson’s

book. Here it is argued that Eliot’s moralizing style is “a strategy for weakening the hold of

ethical and values as such, and ultimately […] a move consistent with modern denunciations

of the ethical binary very much in the spirit of Nietzsche or Sartre.” (120) Mauvais foi, or bad

faith, is the key to this: as a means of self-deception, the attribution of a trait to consciousness,

which necessarily lacks any content whatsoever, it is considered a narrative technique that

“exists in order to undermine the ethical binary and to discredit the metaphysical and moral

ideologies of evil at the same time that the latter’s uses in plot formation and construction are

replaced with at least some rough equivalent.” (137)

The next two chapters are more theoretical and generic. The first investigates the overcoming

of realism, as already mentioned, through its own momentum. Here Jameson tackles

brilliantly traditional issues such as the Bildungsroman, melodrama and naturalism, which he

conceives as itself a genre of realism. In its fight against romance, against the fixed patterns

of melodrama, in short against reified form, the realist novel becomes “realism’s ultimate

adversary” (162). The last chapter of the first part of the book approaches the thorny issue

of the realist narrator. First person narration acquired here a dramatic character as a “form

of acting, of posing, feigning, taking up positions, before that spectator who is the reader”

(169). This kind of showing, very easily adopted as tool for demystification, will be rejected by

modernism and free indirect discourse, which “seems to evade precisely that theatricality from

which the modernizing novel would like to turn away” (177). A very interesting discussion of

irony follows, leading to the conclusion that “what alone authentically survives the weakening

of all the joints and joists, the bulkheads and leadbearing supports, of narrative as such, of

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the récit on its point of submersion … [is] affect as such, whose triumph over its structural

adversary is that bodiliness that alone marks any singularity of the everyday, and which now

turns to engage its new literary adversary in lyric and language” (184).

The second part of The Antinomies of Realism is called “The logic of the Material” and comprises

three chapters. The first is devoted to the relationship between realism and providence, or

existence and meaning. From what has been exposed so far, it will have become obvious

that realism resists being absorbed by providence and will have to cope with it, rejecting

any external, teleological form of ending. Jameson identifies four logical possibilities in

the combinations of these terms: transcendental immanence, transcendental transcendence,

immanent transcendence, and immanent immanence. In “War and Representation”, Jameson

argues that war is irrepresentable, that abstraction and sense-datum “are the two poles of a

dialectic of war, incomprehensible in their mutual isolation and which dictate dilemmas of

representation only navigable by formal innovation […] and not by any narrative convention”

(256). This is important because war stands for other collective experiences, which inherently

“tempt and exasperate narrative ambitions, conventional and experimental alike” (257). The

last chapter faces the historical novel, whose very possibility the gist of the book squarely

denies. The argument proceeds by unfolding the logical possibilities of the opposition of

names and events. The most surprising part is the very end, when Jameson finds the survival

of the historical novel in the future, for he asserts that “the historical novel of the future

(which is to say of our own present) will necessarily be Science-Fictional inasmuch as it will

have to include questions about the fate of our social system, which has become a second

nature” (298).

Of course, his summary of the argument of The Antinomies of Realism, as almost any other

one could think of, makes violence to the text, since it fails to take into consideration the

multitude of analytical insights present throughout the book. The richness of the material and

the originality of the composition are both exhilarating and exasperating. Exhilarating because

of the novelty of connections and the learning involved in them; exasperating because of the

near impossibility of mastering the whole textual universe mobilized by Jameson. Also, the

other side of his ingenuity is the sense that his object of study does not preexist analysis,

that it is constructed in the same gesture as it is presented. This would explain the peculiarity

of Jameson’s connectives, his “meanwhiles” and “buts”, as well as his argumentative flash-

forwards, “as we shall see” etc. Be it as it may, this exposition of The Antinomies of Realism

should suffice to support one criticism, namely, that its core concepts, those of story telling

and affect, could have been worked out less solidly. To be sure, their configurations are

complex enough, but their status as tools is never questioned. In other words, the book

would profit if affect had also and at the same time be taken to be a sign or symptom of social

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configurations. Otherwise narrativity and affect run the risk of being taken as atemporal,

quasi-Kantian, categories. But perhaps this is the price to be paid for a kind of writing that,

being faithful to itself, never ceases to be stunning.

1. This is mirrored in the very reception of Jameson’s work in country: post-structuralists read his characterization of

postmodernism as it were ontologically, ignoring its grounding on a capitalist mode of production, whereas Marxists

disregard Jameson’s indebtedness to structuralism (Lévi-Strauss, Greimas) and recent French philosophy (Deleuze,

Derrida).

2. Postmodernism; or the cultural logic of late capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); A Singular Modernity (London

and New York: Verso, 2002); and The Modernist Papers (London and New York: Verso, 2007).

3. For an introductory view see my Teoria (literária) americana (Campinas: Autores Associados, 2011).

4. It would be tempting here to adapt Jameson’s own reading of modernity as a narrative category, rather than as a fixed

periodizing marker, to realism itself in what could be termed a realist function as the capacity to extract social truth. See

Singular Modernity, p. 31-41.

5. As for instance in Roberto Schwarz’s analysis of Machado de Assis in A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism (Durham:

Duke U.P., 2001).

Marnin Young: The Antinomies of Time

As the first two chapters of Fredric Jameson’s book make clear, the antinomies of realism

can be understood as the dialectical interweaving of “the narrative impulse” and what is called

“affect.” 1 This interaction ultimately rests on an equally dialectical relation of “destiny”—or,

the “chronological temporality of the récit” (10)—and an “eternal present.” “Realism lies

at their intersection,” Jameson writes (26). The choice of the word “affect,” defined here

at one point as the “autonomization of the sensory” (55), is both surprising and deliberate.

No doubt it will prove contentious. It is significant, however, that “affect” replaces the

word “description” in the conventional, or conventionally dialectical, understanding of the

emergence of realism. While Georg Lukacs famously twinned narration and description in

his analysis of the realist novel in order, following Friedrich Engels, to denigrate the work of

Emile Zola in favor of Honoré de Balzac, Jameson reverses the evaluation and asserts that

with Zola we see the very “codification of affect.” 2 Passages from Le Ventre de Paris (1873),

among others, demonstrate the difference between the allegorical nature of description in

Balzac and what might be more persuasively called the “representation of affect” (76) in the

focalized (“point-of-view”) descriptions of the bodily “sensations” of characters in Zola. The

consequent “liberation from meaning,” the prying apart of description from its place within

a narrative unfolding predetermined by genetic and environmental determinism, moves these

passages into “their own temporality” (64).

This temporality, as Jameson repeatedly suggests, has something profoundly to do with

painting. Indeed, a “significant, experimental moment in Zola’s approach to affect” can be

found in his use of the character Claude Lantier’s “painterly eye” to organize the central

character Florent’s perception of the array of food on display at Les Halles (56). Zola

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himself later defined description as “la peinture nécessaire du milieu.” 3 Parallel to this literary

investment in affect and its temporality, Wagnerian chromaticism and the painting of

Édouard Manet led to later “pseudo-scientific experiments with perception” that released

a “flow of affect” (41). Ultimately, and importantly, “Time is thus famously eternalized by

Monet’s impressionism, as the latter painted his haystacks or cathedrals at every moment of

the day from dawn to dusk, seizing each shade of light as a distinct event which the surfaces

in question are but a pretext for capturing” (41). And in turn, “This new ‘pure present’ of

the visual data of paint and painting in reality harbors new kinds of narrative movement and

awakens new trajectories in the movement of the eye and new conceptions of the visual event

and its new temporalities” (41). Like painting in the “era of Zola’s defense of Manet and of

nascent impressionism,” Le Ventre de Paris unleashes “sensory onslaughts” that “suggest whole

new forms of temporal organization” (65).

As these artistic references imply, the anti-narrative “present” which Jameson explicitly

identifies “as the realm of affect” (10) has been more consistently associated in the history

of art with “realism’s dissolution, which we always seem to call modernism” (8-9). Indeed, as

Michael Fried has argued in Manet’s Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s, “pictorial

realism in the West has often involved a tacit or implicit illusion of the passage of time,

of sheer duration.” 4 This tendency has followed one of two means of representing time

in painting: that which is “keyed to the persistence, essentially unchanged over time, of

easel paintings as material objects.” 5 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following

Fried’s account of the anti-theatrical tradition, this mode was consistently found in paintings

whose characters are so absorbed in their own thoughts or actions that they effectively

deny the beholder’s presence in front of the canvas. 6 Jameson quite convincingly brings

this understanding of anti-theatricality to bear on a number issues, including notably the

persistence of melodrama in Zola’s work. Yet, he does not note that, in tandem with the

very emergence of the term “realism”—“with Duranty and the supporters of painters like

Courbet” (10)—absorption in its Diderotian conception started to unravel. In the work of

both Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, the longstanding artistic drive to compel

conviction—to make paintings that appear uncontrived, natural, real—demanded more and

more extreme forms of absorption and temporal duration, culminating ultimately with the

“reversing or liquidating” of the entire absorptive tradition in the painting of Manet. 7 With

this turn, Fried argues, a second pictorial temporality came to dominate: “instantaneousness.”

What he also has called “presentness” flows from the perception that the surface of a canvas

can be “taken in all at once, ‘as a whole,’ in a single immeasurably brief coup d’oeil.” 8 The latter

mode subsequently came to dominate in modernist aesthetics, but the interrelation of the two

has long been understood as complex. 9

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Even Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whose 1766 Laocoön canonized the conventional notion

of such temporal limitations—“the single moment in time to which art must confine

itself”—was concerned to underline that artworks are “created not merely to be given a glance

but to be contemplated—contemplated repeatedly and at length.” 10 Following Aristotlean

theories of unity, however, academic theory in the mid-nineteenth century came to insist that,

“in painting, the setting is immutable, the time indivisible, and the action instantaneous.” 11 As

avant-garde painters sought to evade the limitations of such narrative confines, pictorial

duration and instantaneousness were, in turn, increasingly intensified.

Gustave Courbet, After Dinner at Ornans, 1848-49. Oil on canvas, 195 x 257 cm.

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.

For their part, realist painters of the 1840s and 1850s endeavored to sustain their

representational fictions by harnessing a durational temporality in both form and content.

Paradigmatically, the After Dinner at Ornans showcases Courbet’s “consistent eschewal of

instantaneousness in favor of effects of duration, of slow or repetitive or continuous actions,

the very perception of which is felt by the viewer to take place over time.” 12 Here the

continuous violin playing of Courbet’s friend Alphonse Promayet on the right buoys the

subdued but persistent absorption of Adolphe Marlet, lighting a pipe with his back to the

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viewer; Urbain Cuenot on the far side of the table; and the painter’s father on the left of the

canvas. A dog lies curled beneath Marlet’s chair, asleep, unmoving. For many long minutes,

the beholder must imagine, the scene has endured exactly like this; nothing indicates it will

change anytime soon. The painting calls up “an almost palpable temporal duration.” 13

Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1868-69. Oil on canvas, 252 x 302 cm. Staedtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim.

In the decades that followed, however, the modernist painting that emerged in the work

of Manet, with its “striking” and emphatic foregrounding of the flatness of the painted

surface, saw a pendulum swing in pictorial temporality. A canvas such as The Execution

of Maximilian—however much it suggests a contradictory and narrow “temporal

extension”—can be said to function within “the framework of a thematics of

instantaneousness, keyed to the flame and smoke issuing from the muskets.” 14 Fried

summarizes the extraordinary temporal self-consciousness of the production: “It’s hard to

think of another picture in all Western art that so determinedly draws attention to the

inevitably aporetic nature of the fiction of instantaneousness even as it appeals to that

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fiction for its basic structure.” 15 That Impressionism could be understood only a few years

later to represent “movement’s elusive, fugitive, instantaneous quality” 16 or “the impression

of the first coup d’oeil” 17 flows directly from Manet’s innovations. By the late 1870s, when

The Execution of Maximilian was finally shown in public, the motif, the rendering, and the

experience of avant-garde painting all suggested not duration but what was then called, for

the first time, “instantaneity.” 18

As Fried suggests, however, and as I have argued elsewhere, the earlier durational temporality

associated with the painting of Courbet persisted into the early 1880s. 19 Indeed, the artists

most closely associated with Zola’s literary innovations—naturalism is what he called the

painting of Jules Bastien-Lepage for instance—were consistently pulled between a durational

time built on a thematics of absorption and an instantaneousness associated not only with

impressionism but increasingly with photography. 20 In key instances, a double-structure of

duration and instant fueled the distinctive pictorial concerns of later realist painters such as

Gustave Caillebotte or the early James Ensor. 21 That the former’s 1875 Floor Scrapers appears

on the cover of The Antinomies of Realism ultimately begs the question, then, of the relation

between the “painterly eye” of the novelist and the painting of the same period. Is the

“intersection” of temporalities in the realist novel the same as that found in later realist

painting?

That Jameson is the first to situate the emergence of a parallel temporal double-structure

in Zola’s novels should not surprise anyone who has followed his longstanding concern

with modernity’s shifting “conceptualization of time and temporality” (9). Following Arno

Mayer’s broad historical revisionism, Jameson has more than once called attention to the

“uneven development” of the temporal ordering of European culture. 22 Before World War

I, he has indicated, only a small segment of the population would have felt the rigors of

measured, clock time as decisively undoing an older, natural view of time. For reasons that

remain fully to be explained modernism in fact came to embrace the forms of temporality

most closely associated with a still-emergent modernity—in the visual arts, instantaneity most

obviously—much in advance of society as a whole. The artistic productions of the late-

nineteenth century, and by extension the “affective” temporalities of the realist novel, thus

emerged from a visceral and ongoing cultural tension between older and newer temporalities.

As Jameson himself puts it in an earlier essay, “the protagonists of those aesthetic and

philosophical revolutions were people who still lived in two distinct worlds simultaneously;

born in those agricultural villages we still sometimes characterize as medieval or premodern,

they developed their vocations in the new urban agglomerations with their radically distinct

and ‘modern’ spaces and temporalities. The sensitivity to deep time in the moderns then

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registers this comparatist perception of the two socioeconomic temporalities which the first

modernists had to negotiate in their own lived experience.” 23

Something like a temporal bilingualism—experienced time persisting side-by-side with

measured time—characterizes the cultural ground from which new artistic productions

emerged in the 1870s. The representation of instantaneity in impressionism, for example,

could have been comprehended by its historical audience only in as much as it was

distinguished from the duration and slowness found in earlier paintings, such as those of the

realist generation that preceded, and within the broader economic and social structures that

lagged behind or resisted the temporal reorganizations of capitalism. The representation of

affect in Zola’s novels, then, sought to match the aesthetic unity of this emergent modernism,

but given its intersection with other more literary temporalities, it should be understood

ultimately as one hybrid and transitional solution, among others, to modernity’s broad and

ongoing restructuring of the very conception and experience of time.

1. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013); hereafter cited in text.

2. See Georg Lukacs, “Narrate or Describe,” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur D. Kahn (New York:

Grosset and Dunlap, 1970), 110-48.

3. Emile Zola, “De la description,” Le Voltaire, 8 June 1880, reprinted in Le Roman experimental (Paris: Charpentier, 1880),

231.

4. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 291.

5. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 291.

6. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1980).

7. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 344.

8. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 291.

See also Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1998), 167: “it is by virtue of their presentness and instantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture

defeat theater.”

9. See Clement Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art” (1959), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a

Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 80: “ideally the whole of a picture

should be taken in at a glance.”

10. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (1766;

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 19.

11. Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin: Architecture, sculpture, peinture (Paris: Renouard, 1867), 537.

12. Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 179-80.

13. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 92.

14. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 356.

On the painting’s “temporal extension,” see John Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, exh. cat. (New York: The

Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 125.

15. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 357.

16. Ernest Chesneau, “A côté du Salon: II. Le Plein air: Exposition du boulevard des Capucines,” Paris-Journal, 7 May 1874,

2.

17. A. Descubes, “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes,” Gazette des lettres, des sciences et des arts 1:12 (20 April 1877): 185.

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18. Eugène Guillaume, “Salon de 1879,” Revue des deux mondes 34 (1 July 1879): 198. On the 1879 exhibition of Manet’s

painting in New York, see Elderfield, Manet, 17.

19. Michael Fried, “Caillebotte’s Impressionism,” Representations 66 (Spring 1999): 49n.3; and Marnin Young, “Heroic

Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers,” The Art Bulletin 90:2 (June 2008): 235-59.

20. Marnin Young, “The Motionless Look of a Painting: Jules Bastien-Lepage, Les Foins, and the End of Realism,” Art

History 37:1 (February 2014): 38-67.

21. See my forthcoming book, Later Realism and the Politics of Time (Yale University Press).

22. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 364;

Jameson, A Singular Modernity: An Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 141-42; and, Jameson, “The End

of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 699. More broadly, see Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime:

Europe to the Great War (1981; London: Verso, 2010).

23. Jameson, “End of Temporality,” 699.

Danielle Coriale: Existential Eliot

Apprehending realism is like looking for the burning filament in an incandescent bulb: it ends

in our turning away, eyes seared with the residual image we couldn’t quite make out when

staring directly into the light. The filament eventually appears, but only belatedly, after we

have stopped looking for it. According to Jameson, most studies of realism are reluctant to

confront their subject directly: they have charted its rise and fall, and described its opposition

to other –isms (modernism is a favorite), but they have not yet apprehended its constitutive

dynamics, the struggling forces within realism that, paradoxically, enable it to flourish. By

contrast, Jameson’s new book, Antinomies of Realism, studies its subject directly, drawing

on Hegelian dialectics to reconstruct the oppositional temporalities and other structuring

antinomies that animate realism from within. In works by different novelists, he discerns a

struggle between the récit (a term that refers to both the tale and its telling) and affect, which

resists the onrushing temporality of the récit: in Tolstoy, it is the rapid succession of moods;

in Zola, it is the streets, crowds, animals, and objects that appeal to the senses; in Galdós, it is

the disappearance of protagonicity. In George Eliot’s novels, the récit resurges in the form of

melodrama, which ‘menaces’ the increasingly democratic form of her novels. 1

The persistence of melodrama in Eliot’s fiction is a fascinating subject and one that has

received considerable attention. 2 But Jameson is the first to turn to existentialism to explain

why, as one early twentieth-century critic observed, “there is rarely a hero, never a villain” in

Eliot’s novels. 3 Jameson’s careful readings of Adam Bede, Romola, and Middlemarch demonstrate

that Eliot endowed her would-be villains with a surprising degree of psychological complexity

that disturbs conventional notions of them as “represented evil.” 4 She did this to accomplish

what many agree was her most pressing formal imperative: the democratic redistribution

of narrative attention across a network of thinking, feeling characters. 5 In place of evil

archetypes, then, Eliot presents weak, fallible characters that are dimly aware of their

wrongdoings and search for ways to justify their actions to themselves. But it is in these

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justifications, Jameson argues, that Eliot anticipates existentialism, for they are examples of

mauvaise foi, or bad faith.

Mauvaise foi occurs when a person lies to himself; he convinces himself that he does not know

what he must know; he chooses to believe (falsely) in a story he has told himself so he can

avoid the truth of his own freely chosen actions. Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

organized a new ethical system around the recognition of mauvaise foi, arguing that one is

neither good nor bad, but more or less willing to acknowledge one’s free choice. Sartre and

Beauvoir describe mauvaise foi in complicated and often contradictory ways, in part because

bad faith is situational and plays out differently in each case and, as Beauvoir would argue, for

different subjects. 6 Perhaps this is why George Eliot recognized mauvaise foi long before the

existentialists. As a novelist, she was accustomed to granular particularity, an expert at tracing

the minute processes that each mind undergoes (or refuses to undergo!) while performing an

action or reflecting upon one. And so, Jameson finds case after stunning case of mauvaise foi

avant le lettre in Eliot’s novels, a discovery that aligns her with existentialist ethics.

One of the most compelling cases Jameson examines is that of Arthur Donnithorne, who

seduces and abandons a pregnant Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede. That Arthur should or ought have

known better than to seduce Hetty is irrelevant; what matters is that he did know better, but

persuaded himself to believe otherwise—this is mauvaise foi. And as I discovered by reading

period reviews, Eliot’s contemporaries discerned its peculiar presence in Adam Bede. Writing

in 1861, one reviewer described Arthur’s mind as “at crosspurposes with itself… a mind

resolving on good,” but paradoxically “content to fail, wishing and longing to fail, even

while it resolves.” 7 Thus in Arthur, the reviewer writes, “We see the whole process of self-

debate and self-deceit,” a process that is prone to embarrassing and revealing interruptions.

The reviewer refers to one such interruption, when Arthur is divested of “all screening

self-excuse for an instant, and he stood face to face with the first great irrevocable evil he

had ever committed.” The reviewer responds to this passage with outrage: “Then?—not

till then!—then?—only for an instant!” 8 Jameson’s argument is borne out beautifully, if

proleptically, in this exclamatory response: it confirms that what is most outrageous about

Arthur is not so much his failure to behave morally; it is his refusal to think authentically.

Authenticity is not as easily achievable as one might think for either Eliot or Beauvoir, both of

whom saw that certain subjects are discouraged from realizing their inborn human freedom.

As Toril Moi argues, Beauvoir’s understanding of mauvaise foi was complicated by the fact that

“sexist society encourages women to take up positions of bad faith—that is to say, to hide

their freedom, their status as subjects, from themselves”—a point that often escapes readers

of the philosophically impoverished English translation of The Second Sex. 9 But even in her

early ethical writings, Beauvoir was interested in the obstacles that inhibit Sartrean freedom.

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In her 1947 book, Pour une morale de l’ambigu?té (The Ethics of Ambiguity), Beauvoir explains that

“l’ignorance, l’erreur sont des faits aussi ineluctables que les murs d’une prison” (ignorance,

error are facts that are as unavoidable/inevitable as the walls of a prison). 10 Ignorance and

error present a particularly pressing problem for existentialist ethics because they inhibit

freedom, which is a precondition of authenticity. One must first be liberated from the bonds

of ignorance in order to fully comprehend conditions as they exist, including truth of one’s

own freedom. Only then can one either choose mauvaise foi or resist its lures. But where is

the line between mauvaise foi and l’ignorance? How can we possibly discern if one is acting in

genuine ignorance or feigned ignorance (hence bad faith)? Eliot’s granularity is helpful here,

particularly the case of Hetty Sorrel, which Jameson leaves tantalizingly unexamined.

Seduced and abandoned by Arthur Donnithorne, Hetty might seem more like the imperiled

victim of melodrama than one of its cruel villains. But when she buries her baby alive at

the base of a nut tree, she threatens to become “the coldly villainous woman…the witch

and evil sorceress who kills her own offspring (Medea).” 11 Realism, Jameson argues, is intent

on “dissolving these archetypes” and appropriating their plots “for new acts of freedom,”

too. And Eliot does liberate Hetty from her role as Medea. But as with the cases Jameson

discusses, the fascination lies in how Hetty exonerates herself, how she permits herself to

believe what she knows not to be true—that her baby may survive. This moment reveals one

of Eliot’s most fascinating insight into existentialist ethics. This is portion of Hetty’s prison-

cell confession to Dinah Morris:

I don’t know how I felt about the baby. I seemed to hate it – it was like a heavy weight hanging

round my neck; and yet its crying went through me, and I daredn’t look at its little hands and

face. But I went on to the wood, and I walked about […] I came to a place where there was

lots of chips and turf, and I sat down on the trunk of a tree to think what I should do. And

all of a sudden I saw a hole under the nut-tree, like a little grave. And it darted into me like

lightning – I’d lay the baby there, and cover it with the grass and the chips. I couldn’t kill it

any other way. And I’d done it in a minute; and, O, it cried so, Dinah – I couldn’t cover it quite

up – I thought perhaps somebody ‘ud come and take care of it, and then it wouldn’t die […]

I thought it was alive…I don’t know whether I was frightened or glad…I don’t know what I

felt. I only know I was in the wood and heard the cry. I don’t know what I felt till I saw the

baby was gone. 12

On the surface, this might appear to be a clear case of mauvaise foi: Hetty convinces herself that

somebody might find the baby: “I couldn’t cover it quite up – I thought perhaps somebody ‘ud

come and take care of it, and then it wouldn’t die.” And later, at the end of her confession,

she returns to this point: “when I’d put it there, I thought I should like somebody to find it,

and save it from dying.” 13 She admits during the confession that this was the only way she

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could bear to kill the baby, so her desire to believe that ‘somebody would come’ is bad faith.

But the repetition of phrases beginning with “I don’t know” or “I didn’t know” is peculiar;

it stresses Hetty’s not knowing at every turn, calling attention to her ignorance—she does not

know her own feelings, her senses, her motives, or even the baby’s state of being.

Hetty’s case requires a more nuanced understanding of what bad faith decisions are and

compels us to contemplate the larger forces that make it more or less difficult to recognize

one’s freedom. In this way, Eliot anticipates Beauvoir as much as Sartre. Like Beauvoir, she

understood the paradox of authenticity: that one can only achieve it if one can comprehend

its promise. Hetty, we discover, is poorly equipped for such comprehension. The narrator

explains that, “She was too ignorant of everything beyond the simple notions and habits in

which she had been brought up, to have any more definite idea of her probable future than

that Arthur would take care of her somehow, and shelter her from anger and scorn.” 14 Hetty’s

“simple notions and habits” do not supply her with enough awareness to understand her

predicament and its probable outcome. Eliot helps us to see that the line between mauvaise

foi and l’ignorance is blurry, particularly when a person’s habitus damages her ability to

comprehend the knowledge she does not have or the authenticity she is not well enough

positioned to choose.

George Eliot, ever the novelist of exemplarity, could not leave off without providing an

example of bonne foi, especially in Middlemarch, but the character she chooses may surprise

anyone who expects a morally perfect exemplar. For existential Eliot, the exemplary character

is not Dorothea, but Rosamond. Known as the selfish, unreflective, callous character whose

vanity and disregard for others make her an unsympathetic outlier, Rosamond Vincy is the

novel’s existential heroine. This becomes clear at the end of the novel, after Will Ladislaw

accuses her of misrepresenting the relationship between them to Dorothea. In the famous

exchange between Rosamond and Dorothea, Rosamond feels compelled to tell her the

truth—that Will loves Dorothea and cares nothing for her (Rosamond). She is “urged by a

mysterious necessity to free herself from something that oppressed her as if it were blood-

guiltiness.” 15 Rosamond’s feeling of oppression stems from a guilt that she refuses to conceal

from herself. Instead, she confronts it directly and chooses to stem her guilt by acting in good

faith. The narrator observes that this is new to Rosamond, who “had delivered her soul under

impulses which she had not known before. She had begun her confession under the subduing

influence of Dorothea’s emotion; and as she went on she had gathered the sense that she

was repelling Will’s reproaches, which were still like a knife-wound within her.” Rosamond

struggles valiantly against what Jameson calls (channeling Sartre) the “trauma of my image

in other people’s eyes which I am powerless to modify.” 16 But her struggle ends in truth-

telling rather than self-deceit; whereas Rosamond could choose to lie to herself about that

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trauma and give herself over to mauvaise foi, she refuses to succumb to a false consciousness

and chooses authenticity instead.

We are meant to see Rosamond’s momentary triumph over mauvaise foi as heroic, a good

faith effort to confront her guilt and override her more venal inclinations. And crucially,

Rosamond is not good: she is, as Lydgate moodily reflects in the finale, “a plant which had

flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.” 17 But she refuses to be unhappy, at least

not through her own bad faith gesture. While moralists might find it perverse, Middlemarch

delivers a new kind of heroine in Rosamond, for she achieves a rare moment of authenticity

when her own dispositions and inclinations were working against her. Thus Jameson is right

about existential Eliot: the dialectical forces operating within her realism help to neutralize

the heavy-handed moralism that Nietzsche famously ridiculed her novels for exemplifying.

But it may be that Middlemarch only replaces morality with a new metric of ethical value:

authenticity. It has been suggested, a French scholar writes, “that the only prescriptive content

of existentialist ethics is the injunction to avoid bad faith.” 18 Perhaps this is true of Eliot, too.

This is one of many lines of inquiry that Jameson’s new book provokes, to say nothing of the

other antinomies we may discover elsewhere in realism’s vast expanses.

1. See Fredric Jameson, Antinomies of Realism (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013), 12.

2. See, for example, Carolyn Williams, “Moving Pictures: George Eliot and Melodrama.” Compassion: The Culture and Politics of

an Emotion. Edited by Lauren Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004): 105-139. David Kurnick, Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure

and the Novel Princeton (Princeton University Press, 2012). Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality and the Nineteenth-

Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Fionnuala Dillane, Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and

the Periodical Press (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

3. Lina Wright Berle, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy: A Contrast (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1917), 43.

4. Jameson, 122. George Levine makes a similar point in his Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, Edited

by George Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16-17.

5. Jameson builds on Alex Woloch’s wonderful analysis of minor characters as the perpetual underclass of the novel in The

One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). By

giving would-be villains their fair share of narrative space, Jameson argues, Eliot enacts a “social Bill of Rights…for the

novel as a form,” particularly in Middlemarch (222). This formal revision weakens melodrama and its trappings, and in so

doing, solidifies Eliot’s realism.

6. Jameson proposes that we call mauvaise foi a “narrative formation,” but it is important to recognize that this formation

does not exist in the abstract: it can only materialize in particular cases. Beauvoir’s own 1968 novella, La femme rompue (The

Broken Woman), sought to particularize mauvaise foi through the case of Monique, a character whose experiences illustrate the

obstacles that make if more difficult, if not impossible, women to achieve authenticity.

7. Unsigned Review, London Quarterly Review, Vol. XVI (July 1861). Reprinted in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, Edited by

David Carroll (New York: Routledge, 1971), 108.

8. Ibid, 105-106.

9. Toril Moi, “The English Translation of The Second Sex.” Signs, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 2002), 1014.

10. Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambigu?té (Paris, Gallimard, 1947), 56. Quoted in Terry Keefe, “Simone de

Beauvoir and Sartre on Mauvaise Foi.” French Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1980), 305.

11. Jameson, 160.

12. Eliot, Adam Bede (New York: Penguin, 1985), 454-455.

13. Ibid, 455.

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14. Ibid, 373-374.

15. Eliot, Middlemarch. Edited by Bert G. Hornback (New York: Norton, 2000), 491.

16. Jameson, 129.

17. Eliot, Middlemarch, 513.

18. Keefe, 301.

Kevin Chua: Jamesonian Affect, or the Lower Depths

Advocates of “new” theories don’t always integrate their theories with older, existing ones;

the blazing of “new” trails often ends up retreading familiar ground. This seems particularly

true of affect theory, which, in its rush towards newness, 1 has displaced, and largely forgotten,

issues and problems that have been worked out in neighboring fields and para-disciplines

such as media theory, 2 science studies, 3 cultural technique, 4 psychoanalytic criticism,

infrastructural criticism, 5 and post-formalist art history. 6 The disciplinary displacement or

overcoming that is affect theory resembles the problem of affect as such: while affects, as pre-

personal and pre-conscious intensities 7 that are ontologically prior to feelings and emotions,

have the potential to destabilize our common understandings of consciousness, agency, and

politics, they pose serious questions with regard to causality and empirical observation. A gap

or lacuna haunts Fredric Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism, 8 which has to do with the space

between affect and the dialectic: can affect ultimately be subsumed into the dialectic – is

affect, at the end of the day, dialectical? My main point is this: Jameson mistakes the autonomy

of affect for the autonomy of the Marxist dialectic. 9

Overall, Jameson’s book rests on a series of oppositions: récit/roman, god-like narration/

subjective point of view, telling (or the reciting of events)/showing (or sheer presence),

meaningful sensory experience/meaningless sensory experience, rational/irrational,

referentiality/autoreferentiality, (conscious) emotions/(unconscious) affects. Generally, the

move from the former to latter term – which governs the entire text – is also the historical

turn to affect that takes place from Balzac to Flaubert and after. Writers like Zola and Galdós

all variously adhere to the latter set of terms.

A characteristic passage is as follows: “At this point, then, a parting of the ways becomes

unavoidable. The ‘serious’ writer – that is, the one who aspires to the distinction of literature

– will keep faith with what alone authentically survives the weakening of all the joints and

joists, the bulkheads and loadbearing supports, of narrative as such, of the récit on its point

of submersion: namely affect as such, whose triumph over its structural adversary is that

bodiliness that alone marks any singularity in the everyday, and which now turns to engage its

new literary adversary in lyric and language. Its fate is henceforth the fate of modernism, and

no longer has any place in this particular story.” (184) Affect is given a transcending power,

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with the rhetoric of weight in the passage enabling a corresponding elevation and escape. And

yet the potentiality of affective intensities is just that – a potentiality. Pre-conscious affects do

not automatically or necessarily succeed into conscious emotion and meaning. In fact the very

‘power’ of affect paradoxically comes from its not converting into something higher.

Jameson uses the phrase “lower depths” several times (eg. 45, 148), but not only, it seems,

to describe the proletariat. The phrase serves as a metaphor in his text, and points to his

assimilation of affect into a Freudian, depth model of the unconscious. Affect is endowed

with a rupturing power – much like Hegelian spirit – with the unconscious always on the verge

of breaking through the surface of consciousness, as it were (eg. 76). So Jameson equates the

movement of affect from lower to upper levels to the movement ‘up’ the dialectic. 10 If Brian

Massumi found the radical “autonomy” of affect, paradoxically, in its capture and closure

“in” the body, 11 for Jameson, autonomy lies in affect’s forward-moving, transcending power,

capable of bringing narrative into non-narrative, subjects into pure abstract form. But, as

Ruth Leys has convincingly shown, the avowed gap between affect and cognition in affect

theorists like Massumi contains a logical fallacy: affect still falls under the purview of a larger

intentionality, and the opposition between mind and body is less firm than we might at first

think. 12 Jameson gives affect too much of a structuring or destroying-creating power, and this

determinism ironically robs affect of its specific, non-signifying force.

The chapter on genre (“Realism and the Dissolution of Genre”) is a good instance where

we find Jameson’s dialectical model breaking down under the weight – or better, unbearable

lightness – of affect. That there are so many exceptions to his postulated rule of genres

canceling and succeeding into higher versions of themselves, all but proves that the dialectic

does not apply, or apply very well. At times, too, Jameson wants to have it both ways: genres

supposedly cancel and succeed into modernist synthesis (of non-genre and non-narrative),

and yet – as though to secure his point – he says that this is nothing but a “reversion

to beginnings,” for the novel is “an omnibus form cobbled together out of heterogenous

materials.” (153)

The inadequacy of dialectics for an explanation of affect also manifests in the occasional

clichés that crop up in Jameson’s text. For example, “enlightenment secularization” (143):

here he assumes the “autonomy” of the secular enlightenment over older, and supposedly

more naïve, religious myths and mysticisms. Yet recent studies have all but overturned this

cliché of an enlightenment characterized by “demystification” (173) and the triumph of the

secular over the religious. 13 Another cliché: “older ideologies, such as vitalism.” (71) Vitalism

was long seen to have indulged in a mysticism of the body (the body as governed by a

metaphysical inner force). The assumption in Jameson’s phrase is of the autonomy of the

rational mind over the body, in all its supposed intractability and opacity. Yet recent work

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has emphasized how different and strikingly non-metaphysical at least 18th

-century vitalism

was from the cliché of mystical vitalism (which was itself a critique mostly made by Marxists

in the 19th

and early-20th

centuries, who were arrogating power and autonomy for their

own mechanical and ‘secular’ philosophy). 14 A few Eurocentrisms also nag Jameson’s text

– this from a scholar who has done so much for global literary criticism. For instance,

his reference to an “export model” of literary transmission (179) propagates the misleading

notion that ideas were flowing unidirectionally from one (Western) culture to a (non-Western)

other. Autonomy here relates to the tired Eurocentric notion of the superiority and historical

(a)priority of Western culture over the cultures of the non-West. (One thinks here of Perry

Anderson’s trenchant account of how the term “postmodern” first arose outside the West, and

was only later adopted, however critically, by theorists like Jameson.) 15 The “export model”

also privileges the sender and disseminatory context rather than the receiver and place of

uptake; new scholarship in communication and media theory has, however, problematized

this sender-receiver model that took hold between the 18th

and 20th

centuries, which borrows

its root metaphor from the postal system and telegraphy. 16 Communication, even in the 18th

and 19th

centuries, happened more instantaneously, and more para-contextually (think of the

so-called “butterfly effect”), than any linear import-export model. Affect was there: before the

railway, before late-19th

century globalization, before non-Western culture came to be thought

of as “backward” and primitive (Teresa Brennan interestingly points out that the model of

the impermeable self – which certain strands of affect theory have tried to overcome – is a

construction that began in the West, with the beginnings of manners and civilization after

the Medieval era. 17 Affect might allow more conceptual parity between Western and non-

Western cultures.)

Some of the most revealing moments in Jameson’s book occur in passages that he finds in

Zola, Tolstoy, and Galdós. And if there was a novelist to whom affect theory could apply, it

would be Zola. Passages in Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) are not

just marvels of miniaturist description; here it is as though phenomenology turns in on itself

– what’s visualized ‘outside’ seems to correspond to movements ‘inside’ the living body (in

the case of Le Ventre de Paris, literally the belly of the city). Yet these passages (eg. on 53-54

and 57-58), rich and interesting as they are, do not tell us much about affect (affect in the

strict sense of pre-conscious intensities). They seem more about the unrelenting ‘mereness’ of

sensations: what if affects are just ‘there,’ and not so easily swept up into the dialectic? Nor

does Jameson’s analysis – shuttling between the poles of unification and multiplicity, mastery

and loss of control– 18 surpass Susan Harrow’s arguments in her trenchant book Zola, the Body

Modern. 19 What would be a heteronomy of affect, with intensities morphing or branching into

other intensities? One solution, perhaps, is to describe the circularities that obtain between

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affect and cognition, intensity and meaning. That might be one way to avoid a depth model of

the unconscious, and move instead towards a topological model of the self, and of the body

and its milieu.

Ultimately, the peculiar temporality of affect seems insufficiently explained by the dialectic,

which – in Jameson’s use at least – remains linear. 20 Perhaps the non-linearity of affect was

already there in Deleuze: he alone saw the Hegelian dialectic as something limiting, and sought

out a more expansive and non-reducible temporality. 21 What would be an affect that is truly

anachronic, 22 and how would we describe it? Though Antinomies of Realism is a mighty book

on affect in 19th

-century European literature, I suspect the great book on affect is yet to come.

1. I am sympathetic to Todd Cronan’s suspicions of the newness of affect theory. See Cronan, “The Aesthetic Politics of

Affect,” Radical Philosophy 172, March/April 2012, 51-53; republished in nonsite, issue #5, March 18, 2012.

2. Media theory mostly consists of work done in the wake of Kittler, and/or influenced by Benjamin and Kracauer. For

Friedrich Kittler, see especially Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Meteer, Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1990; and Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1999; an efficient introduction is Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media, Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA:

Polity Press, 2011. See also Eva Horn, “Editor’s Introduction: ‘There Are No Media,’” Grey Room 29, Winter 2008, 6-13.

For Walter Benjamin, see The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael

W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2008. “Media theory” for the 19th

century should also include the literature on sensation and spectacle, such as the notable

studies by Jonathan Crary (Techniques of the Observer, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990; and Suspensions of Perception,

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), Vanessa R. Schwartz (Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris, Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press, 1998), Nicholas Daly (Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2009), and Sara Danius (Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics, Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 2002).

3. Eg. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993,

among many other writings.

4. Eg. Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp, “Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques – Moving Beyond Text,” Theory,

Culture & Society, 2013, 30 (6), 20-29.

5. Eg. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, New York: Routledge, 2011. (Of interest to me is her

parsing of autonomy and heteronomy.)

6. See the various essays on intentionality in nonsite issue #6: Intention and Interpretation (Intention is one area where we

can find the problem of autonomy).

7. “Affect […] is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another

and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such state

considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body […]” Brian Massumi, “Notes on the

Translation and Acknowledgements,” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1987, xvi. Cited in Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal, vol. 8, no. 6, December 2005.

8. London: Verso, 2013. All further references will be made in the body of my text.

9. “Autonomy,” Christopher Wood writes, “[…] was also an internal goal of art, again one that could only be realized after

the fundamental disengagement of art from religion and statecraft carried out in the early modern period. This is the sense

that the artwork itself, and not just art-making and the art-maker, might be self-motivated and self-sufficient. Since artworks

are not living, sentient things, this can only be a metaphorical goal – unless the artwork is literally, magically, meant to come

to life.” Wood, “Why Autonomy?”, Perspecta, vol. 33, 2002, 48. Autonomy also refers to the independence of the work of art

from the material world; in the modern era, it served as a powerful ideal, and was associated with freedom. For Robert

Pippin, autonomy “simply expresses the oldest classical philosophical ideal: the possibility that human beings can regulate

and evaluate their beliefs by rational self-reflection, that they can free themselves from interest, passion, tradition, prejudice,

and autonomously ‘rule’ their own thoughts, and that they can determine their actions as a result of self-reflection and

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rational evaluation, an evaluation the conclusions of which ought to bind any rational agent.” Pippin, Modernism as a

Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, second edition, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999, 12.

10. Somehow Jameson appears to rely on a more traditional version of Hegel, in contrast to more recent theorists who have

problematized the teleological nature of Hegel’s dialectic: eg. Robert Pippin, “You Can’t Get There From Here: Transition

Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993, 52-85.

11. “Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential

for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or

blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture –

and of the fact that something has always and again escaped.” Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, Durham: Duke

University Press, 2002, 35.

12. “The mistake they [Massumi and Lisbet] make is to idealize the mind by defining it as a purely disembodied

consciousness and then, when the artificial requirements of the experimental setup appear to indicate that consciousness of

the willing or intention comes ‘too late’ in the causal chain to account for the movements under study, to conclude in

dualist fashion that intentionality has no place in the initiation of such movements and that therefore it must be the brain

which does all the thinking and feeling and moving for us. (All the ‘willing,’ so to speak.)” Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect:

A Critique,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 3, Spring 2011, 456-7.

13. David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna, Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2008; Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, eds. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan,

New York: Fordham University Press, 2006; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: the Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 2007.

14. See Charles T. Wolfe, “From Substantival to Functional Vitalism and Beyond: Animas, Organisms and Attitudes,” Eidos

No. 14, 2011, 212-35.

15. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso, 1998.

16. See Bruce Clarke, “Communication,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 131-44; John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: a History of the Idea of

Communication, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999; John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry,

vol. 36, no. 2, Winter 2010, 321-62.

17. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

18. “simultaneously with this first centrifugal movement of mastery and subsumption, of the ordering of raw nameless

things into their proper genetic classifications, there exists a second movement which undermines this one and secretly

discredits it – a tremendous fermenting and bubbling pullulation in which the simplicity of words and names is unsettled to

the point of an ecstatic dizziness by the visual multiplicity of the things themselves and the sensations that they press on the

unforewarned observer. […] Finally the realm of the visual begins to separate from that of the verbal and conceptual and to

float away in a new kind of autonomy.” (54-55)

19. Eg.: “The reader is drawn into the experience of imagined or remembered sensation via luxuriant description where the

very ‘thickness’ of writing seems to duplicate the fullness of sentience and to enfold the reader in a verbal analogue of

remembered or imagined corporeal experience.” Susan Harrow, Zola, the Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation,

London: Legenda, 2010, 85. For Le Ventre de Paris, see especially 89-90. Jameson cites Harrow’s book on 45.

20. For Jameson’s understanding of Deleuze, see his essay “Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze,” The South Atlantic Quarterly,

vol. 96, no. 3, Summer 1997, 393-417.

21. For Hegel and Deleuze, see Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze, Hegel, and the Post-Kantian Tradition,” in Philosophy Today, 44,

2000, supplement, 119-31; and Nathan Widder, “Negation, Disjunction, and the New Theory of Forces: Deleuze’s Critique

of Hegel,” in Hegel and Deleuze: Together Again for the First Time, eds. Karen Houle and Jim Vernon, Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press, 2013, 18-37. (Despite Deleuze’s avowed antipathy towards Hegel, both philosophers have

more in common than at first appears.)

22. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York: Zone Books, 2010. Note Jameson’s

mention of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis on 153.

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Goran Blix is an Associate Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University. He studies the tradition of nineteenth-

century French prose writing in the context of major historical and political developments. His interests include

romanticism, realism, literary aesthetics, the historical imagination, and the relationship between democracy and literature.

He has published articles on Balzac, Hugo, Michelet, Flaubert, Tocqueville, the Goncourt brothers, and Zola, among

others, and his book on romantic historicism, From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archeology

(2008), examines the impact of the nascent science of archeology on modern secular attitudes to death, memory, and

immortality. He earned a B.A. in Literature from Harvard College (1996), a DEA from the École des Hautes Études en

Sciences Sociales (1998), and a Ph.D. in French from Columbia University (2003). He joined the Department of French and

Italian at Princeton University in 2003.

Danielle Follett is Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor) in the English department at the Université de Franche-

Comté, Besançon, France. She specializes in 19th-century history of ideas, literature and aesthetics. She has published

numerous articles and is co-editor of The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

Fabio Akcelrud Durão is Professor of Literary Theory at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). He is the author of

Modernism and Coherence: Four Chapters of a Negative Aesthetics (2008), Teoria (literária) americana (2011) and Fragmentos Reunidos

(forthcoming in 2014), among others.

Marnin Young is associate professor of art history at Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University. He has published

articles and reviews in journals such as The Art Bulletin, Art History, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-

Century Visual Culture, and the Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art. A book, Realism in

the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Danielle Coriale is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of South

Carolina. She specializes in Victorian literature and culture, and the history and philosophy of science, and has published

essays in Nineteenth-Century Literature, SEL, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. She is currently completing a book

manuscript on zoological writing and Victorian fiction, which includes chapters on Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and

George Eliot.

Kevin Chua (PhD University of California, Berkeley) writes and teaches on the history of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-

Century European art and Contemporary Asian Art at Texas Tech University. He is currently working on a book-length

project on vitalism and painting in 1760s France.

nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated

with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668.

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J A M E S O N R E S P O N D SJ A M E S O N R E S P O N D S

F R E D R I C J A M E S O NF R E D R I C J A M E S O N

Editor’s note: this is a response to Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism, published on nonsite.org.

***

I’m grateful for this symposium on Antinomies, not least because of the varied backgrounds

reflected in the commentaries. In particular, it is good to know that it is interesting, but still

more so that it is useful, as the discussions of Eliot scholarship and of realism in painting seem

to demonstrate. As far as I’m concerned, the negative comments are helpful in showing me

what I haven’t kept up with in newer theorizations and as indices of the Zeitgeist, something

one always wants to remain in contact with, even when moving further and further into the

past, as this book does.

Antinomies is not a monograph but a theoretical exercise or essay; and I’m rather proud of the

way in which my exhibits touch in turn on all the major national languages in the Western

realist tradition, from Russia to the U.S. I’ve written elsewhere on major achievements in

Danish, Polish and Finnish literature, so I don’t think I can be accused of great-power bias;

but there certainly remain questions of exclusion: where is Stendhal in all this, for example?

(Dickens is implicitly touched on in the discussion of first-person narrative, inasmuch as

he was a kind of actor who essentially wrote scripts for his own performances.) But other

exclusions (and inclusions) had a more practical point to them: The entire English tradition

was omitted, for example, as a pointed reminder that there are other languages and literatures

(sometimes even more important) in the world and in history. I began with Zola in order to

restore his always ambiguous reputation and his extraordinary achievement (it is after all the

naturalist novel which was the great world-wide influence and not Balzac or Jane Austin or

Goethe, however dear they may be to some of us); and I placed Galdós at the very center in

order to deprovincialize our standard canon and to win a little more interest in this immense

figure (and in Spain itself, normally reduced to prologue or one indispensable prologue or

footnote—the Quijote—in our literary-historical stereotypes). And of course there is the

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absence of that great enigma who is Dostoyevsky. At any rate, the theoretical sketch I offered

was not without its polemic digs and conspiratorial innuendoes.

What I want to comment on here, however—what this symposium made most painfully clear

was my failure more fully to clarify or even identify my fundamental philosophical positions

(not that the book needed to be any longer). I will therefore sketch three of them in: the

matter of “empty consciousness,” whatever that means; my own take on affect; and the

missing sociological (or Marxist) dimension.

As far as the “explanation” of consciousness as such, I share Colin McGinn’s skepticism

about its possibility. Dennett does not satisfy me philosophically (I have a study of him

coming out in my next book, on allegory), and I don’t for a minute believe that neuroscience

will ever achieve much more than a thorough-going mapping of that lump of meat which is

the brain. So Kant’s unknowable skepticism about the soul (for him just another “thing-in-

itself”) remains for me the only tenable position (and Derrida’s master’s thesis on Husserl’s

failure to “ground” it seemed to me admirably paradigmatic).

The problem with Kant, however, is that for him presumably the soul was a good deal

more than mere empty or existential consciousness as such: it included personal identity,

the “ownness” of that unique subjectivity which is “mine,” and so forth and so on. Those

matters need to be radically separated from this so-called “empty consciousness” (I hope I

didn’t use this deplorable expression as much as some of these commentaries suggest, but

there really is no word for it and there cannot be, since it is not a thing with properties,

which one could enumerate, characterize, inventory, and so forth). For that, the unavoidable

statement is for me Sartre’s first work, Transcendence of the Ego, perhaps the only one to

survive the structuralist tsunami and the subsequent de-marxification and heideggerianization

of the French intelligentsia, and a major influence on Lacan (and Badiou). Put simply, it

posits a radical differentiation between “pure” consciousness—is that a better word than

“empty”—or intentionality, as he calls it, and the rest of the ego—my personal identity, my

sense of self, indeed, my “self” itself, etc. This is then the radical void into which eventually

affect can seep; and it also has the merit of allowing us to sweep away pseudo-concepts like

the omniscient or implied narrator. The other inelegant and repetitive word overused here is

the term “meaningless,” which is not meant at all negatively and functions as a substitute for

“contingent” (the theoretical reference being Barthes’ “L’Effet de réel”). I should add, as a

counterpoint to this, that my comments on Balzacian allegory are not meant negatively either

(and that no one lacking an addiction to Balzac can really be counted as a lover of the novel,

or even its roommate, as Michael Wood memorably put it).

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Now as to affect, I made it clear that I had no intention of intervening in present-day

debates and discussions of this interesting and henceforth omnipresent term. What needs

to be understood about my distance from those polemics is that I still believe in the binary

opposition, and am in that sense, I guess, some kind of structuralist Hegelian, or better still,

that I include Hegel in Marx and structuralism in the dialectic. “Oppositions without positive

terms”: such was Saussure’s great formula, his reinvention of the dialectic on a linguistic basis.

Concepts do not exist in isolation, they are defined by their opposites: it is a dialectical lesson

as well as a structuralist one, and in the best of worlds the latter should lead back to the

former, which it reinvents in a new and contemporary way. Unfortunately, in Antinomies you

only get half of this opposition, and it is that incompleteness which has led to some of the

dissatisfaction here, I think. For I define affect as a kind opposite to emotion, or rather to

what I stubbornly insisted on calling the “named emotion,” without making very clear why

I did so. For in my perspective the emotions form a kind of semiotic system (like colors

for the cultural anthropologist), and they are reified by way of their names. The system of

emotions, then, is for me an allegorical matter, and will form the centerpiece of my next

book (sorry for these personal forecasts). At any rate, in that sense Antinomies is necessarily

incomplete, even though I tried to mark the place of emotion in my discussions of affect.

But this is also the sense in which for me most discussions of both things are not altogether

satisfactory: the discussions in queer theory of affect as well as the discussions of emotions in

such admirably scholarly work as that of Amélie Rorty on emotion, or the more moralizing

and liberal approach of Martha Nussbaum to such matters. We need to think of the named

emotions as a kind of historical system, like that of the humors (to which they are so intimately

related). But enough of this unfinished business, which is certain (rightly) to irritate some

readers.

And now, finally, the historical basis of all this. Where is the marxismo? I remain, to be sure,

a socialist and a rather orthodox Marxist (who still believes in the falling rate of profit, let

alone class struggle and all that), but you won’t find much of that here, where the literary

focus seems much closer to the metaphysical Theory of the Novel than to the political History

and Class Consciousness, let alone Lukacs’ later theory of realism; and this is certainly a matter

of embarrassment for me who find myself apologizing for Antinomies as something of a

structuralist experiment. But after all, there are mediations to be considered. First of all,

bourgeois culture (including its characteristic product, the novel) is a class culture which does

not really exist any longer in our part of the world (see Franco Moretti’s recent book, The

Bourgeois): indeed, you can have class without a class culture as we currently do. I seem to

single out one lone feature of this once new culture, and that is the development or emergence

of the bourgeois body, something that cannot really be defended except by time-travelling

telepathy, insofar as we have never inhabited any of the others, let alone even this older

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bourgeois one. I will however observe that I do not merely evoke the body in some standard

ideological fashion, but try to isolate and experimentally to observe its emergence in language:

here it is language which is the sign and symptom of historical change and transformation,

it is in the process of grappling with new language-problems that we can catch sight of this

phenomenon, with the proviso that these are language problems quite different from those

posed by the older nomenclature of the named emotions. A position of this kind ought to

have led us on to the question (and the ideology) of expression as such, and maybe to its

relationship to narrative. Certainly the rethinking of style—as has been so pertinently and

admirably proposed here—is the beginning of wisdom: wish I had thought of it myself.

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous

books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political

economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including

Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies

of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated

with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668.

FREDRIC JAMESON - JAMESON RESPONDS

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P O E T R YP O E T R Y

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T W O S O N N E T ST W O S O N N E T S

A N T H O N Y O P A LA N T H O N Y O P A L

SONNET

The wolf prowls the hills, kills what it kills.

We make our house on stilts to avoid

the firm ground and the loose ground alike.

Sounds of a prophet and the soundlessness

of a hermit as heard from outside

the city’s limits is inscribed on the backs

of parking tickets. I sit in the car

searching for anything to write on. Mirror!

Window! Dashboard! Light! I invite the wolf

inside our Chrysler for a ride. Christ,

my wife says when I text her a picture

of the wolf in the passenger’s seat (and

I agree). After an hour the wolf

sets me free, leaves, transfigures into these.

SONNET

A bird flies out from the mouth of the tomb’s

wound, to the hospital shaped headache

I’m doing this for you. The apartment’s

a zoo full of different shaped fish fins,

each denoting a different kind of suffering,

and each depicting the exact arc of

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the heart within the heart within the heart.

The wind slams the screen door into fours

as grace which is the word “grace” slips away

between the bare branches of the rain.

I hear that everybody loves the sound

of a train in the distance: sing, sang, sung.

A pain forms at the base of the skull

and then moves to the other side of my mind.

Anthony Opal is the author of ACTION (forthcoming from Punctum Books) and editor of The Economy. Recent poems

can be found in Poetry, Notre Dame Review, Birdfeast, and elsewhere. He lives near Chicago with his wife and daughter.

nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated

with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668.

ANTHONY OPAL - TWO SONNETS

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